(Courtesy Web 2.0 Suicide Machine)

If you’re tired of all the hype surrounding Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the countless other social media Web sites that have sprung up over the past few years, you’re not alone. If you’ve gone so far as to decide never to spend time on social networking sites again, you can take advantage of a tool called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. Once you log in, an automated server begins the process, and you can watch each action in progress (assuming you have the latest version of Flash installed). The actions taken depend on what the authors of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can do on each site.

Once you pick an account to delete, the system logs in to the service and changes your password — you won’t be able to log back in and rebuild your account, so don’t undertake this lightly! Next, you’ll see each of your connections being deleted, one by one. That’s it. No more account. The site’s authors say that social networking Web sites offer the “antithesis of human freedom.” In addition, they remind us that Facebook has said it will retain information about you, even if you delete your account. By using the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, the group hopes that erasing your contacts and other information and leaving the account whole will help remove those data from the site cache. The script also creates a little memorial on the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine site that says who deleted his or her account and when.

Of course, many of the services that the site works with allow you to completely delete your account, but the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine doesn’t do that; in fact, the point is to make a symbolic break from the site. On sites where it can, the script changes your profile picture to a noose to show that you’ve chosen to leave the service. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine FAQ states that the organization doesn’t keep your personal information, and cannot stop the process if you choose to use the site.

Facebook would prefer that you don’t use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and has blocked the site’s IP address, preventing anyone from using it to log in and delete their accounts. A Facebook representative told Andrew LaVallee of The Wall Street Journal that scraping Facebook profiles is against the site’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. In addition, the company may take additional action in the future. I’m thinking other social networking sites will follow suit once the site becomes better known and more frequently used.

If you’ve given up social networking for your New Year’s resolution and you’re really serious — really, really serious — you can still use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine to change your Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn profiles. The site’s developers are looking at ways to use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine on other networks, including flickr and Hyves, according to the FAQ.