Taking the Anti-Social Media Plunge with Suicide Machine
The social networking scene has certainly come a long way since MySpace’s founding 7 years ago. With Facebook boasting over 350 million active users and live Twitter feeds being integrated into Google search results, these sites are rapidly becoming a daily part of many of our lives – but not everyone’s happy about it. For years, companies have been banning employee access to these sites and recent studies are pinning the blame on Facebook for overall decreases in workplace productivity. Now a new web application is encouraging users to “delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles” and join others in committing “Web 2.0 Suicide”.
The application is the Suicide Machine, and it promises to help those seeking to reconnect with the real world to take the plunge and kick the social networking habit for good. When you hand over your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or MySpace login information to Suicide Machine, you get to watch as the machine logs into your account, changes your password, and purges every last one of your connections. Once the process is complete, Suicide Machine logs out of your account for the last time, leaving you with an unknown password to ensure that no amount of temptation could bring you back.
Suicide Machine doesn’t aim to disable or deactivate accounts completely. It doesn’t even do much for eliminating your presence on the web in search results except stop you from coming up on someone else’s profile. Rather, its goal seems to be to create a movement to give up social media, changing your profile picture to its pink noose logo and joining its “SNS – Social Network Suiciders” group on Facebook before logging you out for the last time. The only problem is that by deleting all of your friends one by one, Suicide Machine shoots itself in the foot. Without social media friends receiving your updates, seeing that you joined the “SNS” group and changed your profile picture to the noose, who will know you’ve even committed “Web 2.0 Suicide”?
Another hiccough the service has run into is Facebook’s blocking of the site as recently as this weekend. Most likely the Suicide Machine was blocked for violating section 3.2 of Facebook’s Terms of Service, in which users agree to “not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.” Suicide Machine could probably get around this restriction by joining the platform as an approved application on Facebook, but for now users will have to settle for a MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn suicide. If the makers of Suicide Machine could be willing to leverage the viral capabilities inherent in Facebook’s design by keeping your connections intact as a way to create visibility for the movement and operating via an approved application on the Facebook platform, it might actually take off in certain circles. Until then, though, the website’s reported 800+ users speak for themselves, whether in Facebook newsfeeds or not.
- Devin
