Whew, time really flies fast! Just when millions of people have converted, i.e. Friendster to Facebok, now, the world has invented a way to terminate your social networking-madness. Link is available!
How to Commit Social Suicide Online
Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with the Web. 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty online application that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, the Suicide Machine has assisted nearly 900 virtual deaths, severing more than 61,300 friendships on Facebook and removing some 233,400 tweets from Twitter.
Once you hand over your log-in details and click "commit," the program will delete each bit of info one-by-one — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn Connections — much like users could do manually. What remains is a brittle cyber-skeleton: a profile with no data. Users seem to love it. Testimonials range from joyous farewells ("Good bye, cruel world!") to good-riddance denouements ("Thank you microblogging. You are, in fact, totally useless"). The Suicide Machine is so popular that thousands are "waiting in line" for their cyber-offing. "Our server is so busy handling the requests," says co-creator Walter Langelaar.
But be warned: as in life, resurrection is impossible. After you "commit," your web doppelganger croaks for good. When it does, you'll receive a cyber-memorial on the site. RIP, 2.0. We'll miss you.
What appeals to many of the site's boosters is the simplicity of the exit. When trying to close an online a
ccount, users are often asked to fill out a questionnaire. More importantly, your information and connections aren't erased; they're just unpublished. By deleting all your data, the site argues, your private information is also snuffed out on website servers.
Not everyone thinks the proposition is so cool. The uptick in social suicides has put Facebook in a tizzy. In an email to the Suicide Machine's founders, Facebook demanded "you cease this activity immediately," citing a violation of users' privacy. The Suicide Machine's founders — Langelaar, 32, Gordan Savicic, 30 and Danya Vasiliev, 31 — disagree, arguing users voluntarily hand over their log-in details. Though Facebook blocked the Suicide Machine from accessing the site earlier this month, the Machine's creators, and suicides are continuing. "Compared to the more than 350 million users [on Facebook], we think deleting a few hundred is not very impressive," says Langelaar. "But they picked up on it as a potential threat." LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter have not yet publicly responded.
Langelaar, who is based in Rotterdam, and Vasiliev, who works in Berlin, first met in 2002 during their undergraduate studies. The pair met Savicic while in art school in the Netherlands in 2007. They describe their work as "geek chic." The Suicide Machine isn't the first collaborative new media project for the trio, who also operate media lab Moddr and are members of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Worm. Inspiration for the Web 2.0-suicide idea took root when Worm threw a 2008 New Year's Eve party themed "Web 2.0 Suicide Night." Recalls Langelaar: "The idea was that everybody would be nice and analog."
And talk about social-networking madness, there's a new thing that I'll guess hit the Philippines sometime maybe after 48 years. Foursquare.com!
Foursquare's Twist on Facebook: A Reward for Checking In
Tweeting was the breakout Web term for 2009. The early favorite for 2010? Checking in.
That's the basis of Foursquare, the gorilla in a new wave of location-based social-networking sites. While sites like Facebook and Twitter are interested in what you're doing, Foursquare is more interested in where you're doing it — and using different ways to reward you for checking in.
Launched in March, Foursquare turns city maps into game boards. Members use text messages or applications for iPhones or Android phones to post when they are at a location like a bar or a restaurant. As incentive to share, your current location shows up on the Foursquare map to help you meet up with friends. Check in enough times from a coffee shop, for example, and you're dubbed its mayor. Give a shout-out from your gym 10 times in a month, and you might get a badge that dubs you a "Gym Rat." That gaming component is the site's secret sauce — one that pushed it past 150,000 users before the end of 2009.
Co-founder Dennis Crowley says Foursquare counts on users' becoming protective of their little territories. Foursquare is birthed from Crowley's previous effort, a now defunct site called Dodgeball that was bought by Google in 2005 but stuggled to expand beyond a few thousand users. Dodgeball had the map part but lacked the game, and when Crowley left Google in 2007, he tried to figure out how to make his next effort more fun. "Once we started resurrecting Dodgeball, we thought adding game mechanics might make it something really interesting," Crowley says. "And it really took off and became sticky with a lot of users.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1952980,00.html#ixzz0d3NTsjCA
After what's been written above, I guess the new way to spell technology is f-a-s-t. I wonder how's everything gonna be after 5 years. Superb, but exciting. =]
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