A couple of weeks back, I found out about Account Killer, which gives you instructions for deleting user accounts with around 500 different web sites. It colour-codes them – sites that are in light blue are easy to leave, but those in grey are more difficult and those in black do not permit you to remove your account with them.
If you’re no longer using an account, it’s a good idea to get rid of it; that way, it’s less vulnerable to being hacked into, so an intruder couldn’t impersonate you. And if you’re like me, you’ll have plenty of sites that you’ve signed up for, used for a bit, and then forgotten about.
Thankfully I use 1Password so getting a list of sites where I have a user account is easy – I just have to scroll through my saved passwords. You could also use the saved passwords list in your web browser.
The accounts that I chose to delete were:
ICQ Account
I haven’t used ICQ since 2006, but the account was still technically active – now that’s gone as well. I also deleted my AOL Instant Messenger account earlier this year, so I’m now ‘just’ on Google Talk, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.
LiveJournal
For some time I’ve been cross-posting entries from here to LiveJournal, but I haven’t seen many click-throughs from it, nor much activity from my friends on there. I actually stopped cross-posting a few weeks ago, with a note to let me know if this is something that people would miss, but there was no response. The only person I really followed on there was Meredith, who also cross-posts from a WordPress blog, so I’ll just read that in future.
LiveJournal seems to be becoming decreasingly relevant in the age of Facebook, and has stagnated, letting rivals like WordPress.com overtake it.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed was quite a good idea back in 2008, when I joined – it allowed you to aggregate your social media presences on one feed. It was fun for a while, and then Facebook bought it, and since then nothing has happened to it. I don’t think anyone really uses it anymore.
In the past, I’ve also deleted other accounts – Orkut and Naymz in 2010, and last year I quit MySpace and Klout as well. To date, I’ve not regretted these decisions.
There are other accounts that I would probably get rid of, if I could. For example, f it weren’t for Flickr I wouldn’t have a need for a Yahoo! account, as I don’t really use any of their other services (I could do without Yahoo! Messenger).
Deleting accounts originally appeared on Neil Turner's Blog and is released under a Creative Commons License.
via Neil Turner's Blog http://www.neilturner.me.uk/2012/12/06/deleting-accounts.html