Has Facebook killed off the virtual suicide game?

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 15 December 2009 17:26

Your IT - Home IT

Want to finish off your online identity with a virtual ritual suicide? Looks like you might be out of luck as seppukoo.com falls on the Facebook sword.

It was a great idea and, if you can push the problem of real suicides played out online to the back of your mind, a pretty funny one. Instead of just not logging in again or using the official account deactivation route, Facebook members wanting to jump the social networking ship could do so in style.

{mosloapdosition davey08}The style in question being seppuku, the ritual death involving Japanese Samurai warriors falling on their own swords, to be precise. Although it was also possible to be reborn by simply logging into Facebook again.

Seppukoo.com asked would be anti-social networkers to enter their Facebook account details, including password, and die on the sword virtually speaking. A memorial page would be published, complete with your last words and your Facebook friends informed of your 'death'.

You could then revisit your memorial page and see what was being said, if anything, about you and your 'death' by your Facebook friends.

The top memorial for a seppukoo suicide is that of Simona Lodi with 4914 points (awarded on the basis of suicidal friends, and friends of friends, in your networks) whose famous last words were the truly inspirational "piss off".

It's a shame that according to the suicide wall the last user to have committed seppukoo was some 3 days ago now, suggesting that Facebook have put a stop to the tongue in cheek shenanigans.

Indeed, a Facebook spokesman told the LA Times that it had automatically blocked the posting of any links to seppukoo.com on Facebook, explaining that "this particular site asks for log-in credentials, scrapes Facebook pages and spams users" all of which are violations of the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Of course, it should be pointed out that it is never a good idea to directly give third party sites your login data for any social network or online service - even if you did want to end it all, virtually speaking.