OK, so this past week I took the opportunity to take care of some digital tumbleweed - online social services that I signed up for in order to try and I've just not used in a while. While  going through these services I also discovered that some of them had gone belly up (or were closing shortly!)  So first of all, a very quick adieu  to Radar (the picture sharing service, ember (a service used by Little Snapper), Seesmic.tv (a videogram service) and youAre (a twitter clone).

Now for services that I actually did delete...

First in this distinction is MySpace.  I joined MySpace after its heyday as a favor to a friend so they wouldn't be friendless there. Well, MySpace was a bit of a dump, and the iPhone app was the only thing that made it usable for me.  After its second acquisition, a redesigned client, and most (if not all) of my friends being on Facebook, it's time for lights out on MySpace.  In the same vain, iLike, a service that MySpace bought, is something I killed off. I joined iLike as a way to scrobble my music, but Last.fm is a service that I prefer. Given that I had no friends there it was easy to kill off.

On the contact management and job sites, goodbye to Jobster and Plaxo, two profiles that I almost never used, opting instead to use my LinkedIn profile. Also a goodbye to VisualCV - an interesting idea, but again I used LinkedIn and the CV that VisualCV created was too canned to my tastes.

Finally two location-based services needed to go.  Locr I had started using when I had a Nokia N80 so I could geo-tag my photos. I honestly didn't use the service so much considering that I had a Flickr account and that's where all my photos went.  Fast forward to three years later, on an iPhone that geotags automatically (or is supposed to anyway).  Locr was an interesting service that I just didn't have use for.  The same goes for BrightKite.  I joined them before foursquare in order to experiment with location check-ins, but since they went the route of kik with group messaging their utility to me was quite low.

There are some more candidates for services to delete myself from.  Those include Jaiku which hasn't progressed since being bought by Google (but I have yet to find a way to delete my account);  Amplify which allows you to copy/paste stuff from other sources on the net and comment on them (aka amplify them); Momentile a photo sharing service similar to radar which I haven't used in ages and somehow the "delete account" option isn't working; and finally Yahoo! Meme...which I seem to be using only once a year ;-)  I am also a member on two Greek social networks, from back when I was comparing various non-English social networks which just don't allow me to delete my profile (or on the case of one of them, the delete mechanism isn't working)...

I guess my one pet-peeve about these services is that some don't allow their users to delete their accounts.  I guess I ought to go in, put in junk data, and consider the account closed...