Every Page is an Island

Written by Bjørn Molstad. Filed under Communication. Tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink. Post a Comment. Leave a Trackback URL.

As social media is slowly con­ver­ting from it’s happy expe­ri­men­tal days to big bucks and tra­ditio­nal busi­ness models, the login you once created to be a part of the digi­tal high­school reunion is too. Like many others, I grin­ned when the sites Seppukoo.com and Suicidemachine.org appeared.

Said to be a jab at the ‘pay-per-view’ social media tendency we’re approa­ching, The pages gave Twit­ter, Face­book and LinkedIn-users a way of com­mi­ting ritual suicide on their account by tediously going through and dele­ting every con­tact, mes­sage, pic­ture and other data, one byte at the time.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/8223187[/vimeo]

Never had it been so fun to get rid of your vir­tual self, and even if the imple­men­ta­tion didn’t exactly leave Face­book empty over night, a four-fold num­ber of users are now sup­po­sedly more alive by being vir­tually dead. drum­roll ;)

I guess get­ting rid of our time-sucking vir­tual iden­tities are get­ting atten­tion for a num­ber of rea­sons, fun merely being a cata­lyst. Face­book on the other hand, aren’t so happy with sites pro­mo­ting account-cancellation of it’s money-in-the-bank of users.

It took a while for the legal team of Face­book to take action and issue a Cease and Desist let­ter to Sepp­ukoo, threate­ning with legal action for vio­la­ting Facebook’s much debated and ever growing State­ment of Rights and Respon­s­i­bi­lities. I am sure they must be right in their inter­pre­ta­tion of their ‘laws’, and the story of Sepp­uko might not be the worst case, but seriously — where this all is lead­ing to?

Where mer­chants of tra­ditio­nal appli­an­ces and ser­vices has to apply their pro­ducts to regions of the world and rules of con­duct, the web is so far more alle­go­ric to The Wild West. Com­bi­ning this with the power that Face­book and other mega-media con­sor­ti­ums now poses­ses, with more users strol­ling through their inter­face daily than any phy­si­cal shop or say — coun­try — has ever had, what will keep the once-so promi­sing social media expe­ri­ment from becoming a cripp­led and money­mad state?

The users, you say? Again?

Front page image by-nc-sa by Stuck in Customs

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