Good Bye Cruel Whirl

Reader Michael Thomas points out that assisted suicide services are now available for those who want to divest themselves from their responsibilities to social network sites. "How to Disappear from Facebook and Twitter" describes how a "Web 2.0 suicide" could be effected. Clearly many revel in this final rhetorical gesture in their online lives:

Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually. What remains is a brittle cyberskeleton: a profile with no data. Users seem to love it. Testimonials range from joyous farewells ("Goodbye, cruel world!") to good-riddance denouements ("Thank you, microblogging. You are, in fact, totally useless"). Suicide Machine is so popular that thousands of people are waiting their turn for their own cyberoffing. "Our server is so busy handling the requests," says Suicide Machine co-creator Walter Langelaar.