Online Suicide!

According to IOLTechnology, as of last Monday Facebook is blocking access from the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a website that allows you to completely eliminate your online presence. Facebook has also sent a letter ordering a “cease and desist” to a website called Seppukoo.com, which gives you the opportunity to destroy your virtual identity as well.

Facebook allows you to delete your profile, for I have done it once before (though it of course did not last long). However, traces of my online identity were still left behind. Information such as pictures and posts can be retraced. It is hard to trust your online identity can truly be gone forever because the Internet is so huge and leaks of information can be dropped. It’s like leaving a fingerprint behind.

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine takes care of all of that for you. . "This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego," the website says. Whether it be facebook, twitter, myspace or any social networking site, this machine will do away with it. Nothing is leaked.

Seppukoo.com urges facebook users to "impress your friends" and "disconnect yourself" by committing online suicide in the style of a Japanese samurai, allowing account eradication through five simple steps. It gives you the option to choose from many R.I.P. templates to leave behind as well as leave some last words behind for a “memorial” page, in which your friends may post testimonials on the left behind “gravestone.” The site notes "Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism (online identity) by disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting 'social' experience." Here is a small video advertisement for Seppukoo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we8N5Zmddds

In Web Publishing we have learned that our online identity is who we want to be and how we present ourselves online. The Internet is user-friendly and therefore if we want to be dead online, it allows us to be dead. A lot of people nowadays may want to turn back from the life they have on the Internet with a possible intent on concentrating more on their real life. These machines carry out this procedure in an almost effortless way.

Upon doing further research I found out facebook’s reason for banning Web 2.0 SM and Sekkukoo was because these websites require the users to give away their password information. Facebook has always been keen on it’s user’s privacy, and giving away password information to another website breaks the Facebook Bill of Rights. In the future facebook may however find it more efficient to add their own little suicide application, realizing that some people may not be as excited anymore about keeping their online identity in their real lives as they were when they first created it.