Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again! - Sign out forever!

This is genius - I just emailed the creator to request an interview

email interview under way - submit any question suggestions fast.

this is what i just emailed one of the creators -

Here's five to get you started

i'll do ten to 12ish total

What sparked this idea? Give me a general chronology - who was involved in creating it, what are your guys back ground? (can I get full names too please)

What do you make of the response to it? I learned of it since it's the feature item today from the Very Short List group - i'll forward that to you

How many people have taken this step so far?

For those, like me, curious about the idea but not ready to do something so drastic can you tell us what happens if you do commit this suicide - does it disable your accounts or is this just more of a mental exercise?

What's so great about this so-called offline world?

incidentally I run a group at newsvine called newsvine addicts and you might enjoy these two pieces that toy with similar ideas but with a sense of irony
26 more signs you're addicted to newsvine

and My 8-Step Program For Leaving Newsvine To Experience the So-Called "Real Life"

Here are his answers

Hi Scott,

Here my answers! Let me know if you have any questions!

Best Wishes
gordo

What sparked this idea? Give me a general chronology - who was involved in
creating it, what are your guys back ground? (can I get full names too
please)

We (the guys from moddr.net, Danja Vasiliev, Walter Langelaar and Gordan
Savicic) organized a Web 2.0 Suicide Night in Worm (a club venue in
Rotterdam) where the idea was to collectively delete your social network
profiles. Just grab a drink, fill out some forms and do away with your
web2.0 alterego. Later, I (Gordan Savicic) started scripting some python
scripts and automatized the whole process. We, moddr— are experimentalists
of everyday technology and critical media thinkers with an artistic
practice. Basically, our lab consists of some very geeky fine-artists.

What do you make of the response to it? I learned of it since it's the
feature item today from the Very Short List group - i'll forward that to
you

At the moment I am very busy maintaining the server, reading through log
files and helping people whose 2.0 suicide encountered complications due to
server lag. The Untwitter feature was actually requested by the users and
we could implement it within a couple of days. We still get a lot of mails
of people wishing to have the suicide machine ported to other platforms
(Hyves, Youtube, Flickr, Orkut, etc.).

How many people have taken this step so far?

We had around 700 2.0suiciders so far, which doesn't probably doesn't sound
much, but this is mostly due to the fact that our server can take only one
session/platform at the moment. So, basically there were around
5000requests, but only 700 were lucky in getting a free slot and about
40.000 friends have been unfriended. At the moment the page is getting more
and more popular, thus we are currently looking into expanding our server
resources to offer multiple sessions at the same time.

For those, like me, curious about the idea but not ready to do something so
drastic can you tell us what happens if you do commit this suicide - does
it disable your accounts or is this just more of a mental exercise?

One of the nicest feature of the web2.0 suicide machine is that you can
actually watch your 2.0 life passing away in real-time. This happens within
a flash window in your webbrowser where you can see the machine logging
into your account, changing password and profile picture, then removing
friend by friend and leaving all the groups you were member of. So, you
find a spot on your couch, grab a drink a have fun while you are at it.
Watch the video to find out more: http://vimeo.com/8223187

What's so great about this so-called offline world?

The suicide machine is of course a radical solution for the by now popular
term “unfriending”, which became Oxford word of the year 2009. I
actually noticed that I spent lots of time reading news feeds from people I
didn't know so well and sometimes I've been procrastinating on Facebook for
hours. Since I got rid of my Facebook account, I feel much more eased about
social interaction and got a lot more productive in front of my computer.
However, I am not blaming social networks for disconnecting people. There
are for sure good aspects in staying connecting with friends and family
living abroad using Facebook & Co., but (most of the) people are not fully
aware of the privacy-tradeoffs. Those services will hold your collected
information forever on their servers and use the acquired data for targeted
marketing analysis. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience
offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users
are entrapped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls,
accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of
paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified
life by the help of automatized machines. Therefore, we hope that by
removing your contact details and friend connections your data is being
cached out from their backup servers. This can happen after days, weeks,
months or even years.

My response

I love the fact you can watch your own suicide - that's almost as good as being able to attend your own funeral.

OK five more questions and then, if it's ok, i'll publish this tomorrow as an interview
1) When did this project begin offering this service?
2) Should I call you guys the Dr. Kevorkians of Social Media?
3) What if someone changes their mind at the last minute? Is there an undo feature?
4) Have you guys gotten any feedback from the groups they're dying from, i.e. facebook or twitter?

5) Question from a guy at newsvine, where I posted this news
can we choose method of death? will the social network commiting suicide tell the others in the net work that screen name "truth hurts" jumped from a bridge?

When did this project begin offering this service? ]
We officially launched on 19th of December 2009, right before Christmas.

Should I call you guys the Dr. Kevorkians of Social Media?
No problem!

What if someone changes their mind at the last minute? Is there an undo
feature?
No, however there's one trade-off with Facebook users which can reset their
password, but very few take advantage of it. Our FAQs explain it very
frankly:

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!

4) Have you guys gotten any feedback from the groups they're dying from,
i.e. facebook or twitter?
Ironically, this project has been heavily discussed on Facebook Groups and
Twitter. We haven't expected such a huge amount of requests in the first
week since launch. We do receive emails from 2.0 suiciders with messages
like „thank you, what you've started is great." or „please do suicide
machine for vkontakte(http://vkontakte.ru)-it`s russian web-site like
facebook! we really need suicide machine for this one!!!".

5) Question from a guy at newsvine, where I posted this news
http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/2009/12/30/3696959-web-20-suicide-machine-meet-your-real-neighbours-again-sign-out-forever
can we choose method of death? will the social network commiting suicide
tell the others in the net work that screen name "truth hurts" jumped from
a bridge?

There are no parameters in your „killing" proccess. In this sense it's
very binary. There's no way back ;)

@2nd question: Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to send a message to all
Facebook friends due to recent security policies implemented by facebook.
We tried to implement that feature but couldn't put it together before our
official launch. However, 2.0 suiciders leave a last message on their wall,
saying that they committed suicide using the www.suicidemachine.org.
- Show quoted text -

My interview will be published in the morning.