Saying Goodbye Was Never This Hard

Robby Russell — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:07:00 -0600

There was a post the other day on Signal vs Noise about the pain of opting out of mailing lists titled, Redonkulous unsubscribe delays, which I was reminded of after the following experience.

Earlier today, I got an email notification from my old Friendster account, which ended up being spam. I hadn’t logged into the account in ages and looked around at my profile and others. No meaningful interaction between my friends in a few years. It’s felt like a ghost town. So, I thought… “should I just delete my account?” I was thinking about doing the same thing with my Facebook account as well, because I’m getting tired of being invited to applications a few times a day due to a friend leaving my name checked when they sign up for a game. (this is getting old…)

So, I decided to kill the Friendster account, which I’ve had since February 2003. Oh… the good ole days of social-networking sites.

Upon filling out a form I got the following error with the notification, “Please list the other social networking site you switched to.”

Uploaded with Skitch!

The tone of this error message is very rude and helped support my decision to leave the site.

While I appreciate that they’re looking for feedback, they shouldn’t demand it out of me. As a result, my response was…

Uploaded with Skitch!

Wait a minute. You’re demanding that I list the sites that I’m switching to… in 20 characters or less? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to LOLBUG you. Sigh. Who makes these interaction decisions there?

If they really wanted to get some useful feedback, perhaps they could have asked me nicer.

So, I decided to head over to Facebook and compare their process.

At first glance, this looks very much like the form that I was presented with on Friendster. Except that I can only select one reason why I am leaving and I can think of a few. However, when I made a selection… something surprised me.

Okay, so maybe I’ll leave my Facebook account around for the time being. Perhaps there is a Facebook application out there that will be get my attention.. but to date, this has yet to happen.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Robby Russell’s Friendster Profile. Feb. 2003 – Dec. 2007. R.I.P.

Robby on Rails: Tag friendster

Saying Goodbye Was Never This Hard