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.
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?
- Is It Illegal To Commit Seppukoo On Your Facebook Account? – Techdirt
- Facebook strikes back against Seppukoo
– LA Times blog
Front page image by-nc-sa by Stuck in Customs
