Today I killed my Yahoo and MySpace accounts. Ahhhhh… cleansing.

As a disciple of The David and Merlin, I did it mainly to reduce my number of “buckets”.

I didn’t use Yahoo mail anymore, especially since their old interface was aging badly and their new beta interface is just overbearing.

I quit MySpace because it’s slow, ad bloated, and ugly. The most annoying thing is that friends got lazy and started favoring MySpace as an email client. Another inbox, yuck.

Now, rather than closing my MySpace account, I deleted all my friends so they wouldn’t think I was still there, and I put a short large type message saying “I’m not here anymore, email me at nathan at some domain dot com”. That way if people from my past want to stalk me (the real reason for MySpace’s popularity), they still have the option.

I did need to close the Yahoo account because they don’t offer forwarding with the free account, and I want mails to bounce rather than collect dust. I did have to forward about 30 important archived emails one at a time to my other email account, which was painful. To add insult to injury, their “delete account” page is broken.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t force users to use the nuclear option of closing their account: Let them forward email, export their data, or set their account to “idle”. If Yahoo had let me forward mail they could have kept me as a customer. Instead I HAD to delete my account.
• Lock-in is a bitch: I had maybe 5 years of email in that Yahoo account. Luckily I keep my inbox pretty clean and I only had to forward about 30 archived emails (still sucked though).

  I feel for MySpace users who have spent a lot of time writing blogs, aquiring friends, and posting pictures. MySpace depends on lock-in, so they will never provide a way for people to export their data and jump ship.

  Going forward I plan never to use software or services that don’t allow me to freely export my data. If a company lives by lock-in, it means their product probably sucks anyway.

• I wish someone would develop an open source, peer to peer, social networking service. I don’t know what such a beast would look like, but it couldn’t be worse than MySpace.