I was initially intrigued last week when I heard about the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine- as anyone who’s prone to compulsive signups knows that many of us leave a trail of abandoned accounts around the interwebs like so many discarded early generation iPods.
I wasn’t compelled enough to write it up here, though, mostly because I was disappointed at its limited scope. The service “kills” you off MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook, and it appears that they’ve only facilitated about 875 “suicides” as of now, a teensy, teensy number of people. The services you can off yourself from also happen to be the ones that have “stuck” the most under the massive, meaningless umbrella of Web 2.0- the ones users are least likely to want off of. To be fair, I instantly realized that finding and deleting you off the services you use least would be almost impossible and searching for forgotten accounts would lead to privacy issues, if possible. Also, it’s unlikely someone can create something comprehensive enough that wouldn’t cause a lot of wrongful deletions, so fair play to them and all.
But everyone loves a catfight, and the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is gleefully trumpeting the fact that they’ve now been banninated from Facebook. “Your suicide team” indicates that they’re working hard to foil Facebook’s foiling:
After more than 50.000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever “signed-out” users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!
Thanks for your understanding Sincerly, Your 2.0 suicide team
PS: If you wanna support us and can set up a decent proxy server, please do not hesitate to contact us at suicide[[at]]moddr[[dot]]net
Of course, in the interim, if you want to be deleted from Facebook, you can go to Facebook and do it. Or, you can stop logging in until you feel like it again.
