Facebook blocks 'social media suicide' website

Are you bored by the status updates of your friends? Do you want to get rid of your online teenage years and delete your MySpace account? Are you tired of living your life so that you have something to tweet about? Then get reality back, and commit social media suicide with Web2.0 Suicide Machine.

In a spectacular way The Dutch website created by your unfriendly neighbourhood medialab moddr_ is designed to end users' social lives on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

No, users don't deactivate their account. The website makes a feast out of the assessment as it shows you how it unfriends person after person on Facebook, or removes bit by bit the people you follow on Twitter.

The purpose of the social media was to make it richer, but we all know that they were never meant to replace social life. However, now that the early elation about social media is over, people are starting to use them more effectively or are stopping using them at all.

You only need to select the social network on the website, enter the user name and your password to commit social media suicide. Next to your profile picture on a memorial page that Suicide Machine maintains, you can send out your last words there.

The project seems to be quite successful. According to Suicide Machine's figures, 56,243 friends have been unfriended, 202,386 tweets have been removed and 856 people quit their online lives, since its launch in December.

But Facebook didn't see the funny side of the site. Facebook has started to prevent its use by blocking Suicide Machine's IP address yesterday, thus making it impossible to use the website to unfriend people.

"Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which violates of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”- in a statement the social media platform said. “We've blocked the site's access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR."

The computer students and hackers from Rotterdam, troop behind Suicide Machine, try to find a way to work around the problem. Seppukoo, a service that enabled users to automate the process of deleting their profile, was closed by Facebook last week.

So while Suicide Machine works well with Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, the only option for Facebook is at the moment to die hard.