Cancelling an online account
Even the least web savvy individual has at least 5 online accounts. A couple of e-mail addresses, MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, etc.
A geek like myself, Justine, or Daynah will register for every online service that has a ‘Sign up now’ button. And if there’s only an option to be invited to the private beta of a service, then we’ll get in on that too.
It’s difficult enough to remember every service I’ve signed up to let alone the login credentials for each. Being to sign up/in with my Twitter/Facebook/OpenID login details for the newest services definitely makes signups quicker and signing in easier.
Yes, I also use 1Password and Firefox’s master password, but all the sites I use are also written down in a document.
One of the hardest things I’ve had to come to terms with is people/friends deleting their accounts. Reasoning like ‘MySpace is dead. I’m deleting my account.’ is naive and a waste of time. Unless you accidentally uploaded that raunchy video you made with your previous boyfriend, then I don’t see any reason in deleting an account. The Internet is forever and in many cases if you delete a video, photo, tweet, etc. it will still exist somewhere.
I screenshot lots of things. I download Viddler/YouTube videos if I think they might be removed very soon.
I understand that things can’t last forever, but deleting some things is just a waste of your time. You spent years designing your MySpace profile, writing on your friends’ Facebook wall, and thinking of a really clever phrase to tweet. Why would you throw that all away?
The thing that baffles my mind the most is when someone deletes an account on a video sharing service. Especially if it’s the only video site they use. Hours of video that you spent years editing, encoding, uploading, titling, tagging, and so on. Why on earth would you throw that all away? Those years. Those awesome memories. All gone (except for in our brains — let’s face it: even the fondest memories can be pushed aside to learn something else in this era of ‘information overload’).
Personally, I just can’t fathom spending so much time creating great content to just to erase it from the server it sits on. Luckily the Wayback Machine remembers a lot of things. One of which is most of my Geocities website. (I also downloaded the as much of my Geocities site that was still active before the service closed down.)
That’s a different yet similar issue: When a site/service closes for good. Brightcove stopped offering free services: my videos were deleted. Viddyou (a site which I only tested by uploading a video or two) was acquired by Motionbox and the only way to save my videos was to transfer them over to my Motionbox account (which I doubt I’ll use much).
This post is about individuals deleting their own content, not sites closing down. But I’d like to mention: If a major site does close down (say, Flickr; heaven forbid!), I’d expect them to offer to send me a physical hard disk (or a few) with all my data on it. Especially because I’m a pro user. And I’d expect them to charge me less than the cost of each drive for that. Anything less and I don’t know if I could go on living.
One of the craziest things I’ve seen individuals do online is delete an account on a particular service and then a month later start up a new one. Huh? Deleting and starting over?
In case you think I’m incapable of deleting anything, then don’t. I delete lots of my local data all the time. RAW photos, HD videos, screenshots. Anything pointless goes in the trash. 99% of content I put online is that which I have put lots of effort in to, and hence I would like the world to see it.
So why do you feel you can easily delete one or more of your online accounts?
