billso.com

The New York Times reported on 11 February 2008 that Facebook users were unable to delete their profiles and data from the social networking site. Manhattan consultant Nipon Das has become a reluctant example, through his two-month struggle to cancel his Facebook membership.

In many Internet-related industries, stickiness is a high priority. Content publishers and web site operators want customers to return again and again to their properties. Return visits mean more advertising revenue and sales opportunities.

What happens if your customers want to leave?

When web sites collect personal information, customers sometimes find they are stuck. I’m one of those folks who continues to receive unwanted email and text messages from services that I tried and later abandoned. I’ve got my own ways of unsticking myself from their customer databases, but that’s another story.

As I reported on 20 June 2007 and 10 August 2007, more professional users are trying social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. This is a difficult market to enter, as Business Week discussed on 22 September 2007.

According to this 13 February 2008 article in the Times, Facebook is trying to deal with user deletion requests. The earlier article attracted more attention to the issue. Right now, the deletion process is manual, and most users will need assistance from Facebook customer service representatives.

As a friendly note to my students, I do not require anyone to sign up for a Facebook account. The Facebook badge that I use on my blog is a handy way to display my email address. I used to republish my blog articles to my Facebook page, but I’ve stopped doing that.

No one has to sign up for a user account at billso.com, either. These user accounts are helpful for people who want to leave comments on the site, but the current version of the site works just fine for anonymous users. It was more trouble than it was worth to require logins on my course web pages, especially since I manage the assignments and grades in TurnItIn.com.

See my other articles about Facebook from 3 January 2008 and 28 May 2007 for more information about that service.