Have you ever felt a longing to “delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego”? If so, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine will be right up your street. Basically it enables you to remove every trace of yourself from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace with the click of a button. All you need is a standard web-browser with Adobe flash plugin and javascript enabled (it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac with most of browsers available).

However, think carefully before you hand over your log in details and click commit, because once you do there is no turning back; all your information will be deleted leaving a brittle cyberskeleton: a profile with no data.

According to an article on www.time.com, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter since its launch on 19 December 2009.

I skimmed through the FAQ section of http://suicidemachine.org/ and found this one quite interesting: Why do we think the web2.0 suicide machine is not unethical?

“Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped 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. Facebook and Co. are going to hold all your informations and pictures on their servers forever! We still hope that by removing your contact details and friend connections one-by-one, your data is being cached out from their backup servers. This can happen after days, weeks, months or even years. So merely deactivating the account is just not enough!”

What do you think of the Suicide Machine? And what impact do you think it will have?