My neverending quest to unlink myself from the sterile and uncreative networks goes on.

Zero Degrees

After having to guess how to contact support (not only is there no obvious way to terminate an account, there is no obvious way to contact support), a very helpful support person said he would terminate it for me. But today, 20 hours later, it has not been terminated

Friendster

I read that Friendster was experimenting with various new communication tools, like chat and blogs, so I decided to take a look before shutting down my account. The blogs are rebranded Typepad, and as far as I can tell, do not integrate with the social networking aspects of Friendster at all, nor do the chat features. For example, it would be sensible to have the typelist for people automatically be populated with your Friendster 'friends' -- but no.

Just providing blogs is not enough to make a difference -- they should have thought about the SNA aspects, otherwise why not just keep your existing blog, or use Typepad directly?

While fiddling around, I was trying to update my photo, and got into some endless loop: I uploaded a new picture, but it never would replace the old one. I kept getting an error when I tried to delete the old one. Aggravating.

However, Friendster is the first service so far to make it easy to quit. They provide a direct mechanism to do it: you go to account setting, and hit the cancel account button. They ask a few questions -- who wouldn't -- but then, bang, your account is gone.