With all the building noise about Facebook and their plans to monetise everyone’s information and connections by progressive privacy invasion I finally decided to delete my profile for good. With some regret, I’ve now even deleted the page I set up for Kakarapiti, though in truth Twitter is a better place for a bird anyway.

In doing this though I started to wonder whether each of the other sites I’m signed up for actually deliver worth to me in excess of the information I’m trading away to them. A thought which lead to a wholesale purge:

• blip.fm
• bookarmy.com
• boozemonkey.com.au
• boxee.com
• brizzly.com
• delicious.com
• dopplr.com (I have to say – I love these guys, it’s just I have no use for their service. They’re so classy they sent me a copy of the data I had entered into their system, such as it was. I wish all social networking sites were like this.)
• facebook.com
• friendfeed.com
• goodreads.com
• hunch.com
• last.fm
• orkut.com
• rudder.com
• secondlife.com

And then there was the services I couldn’t figure out how to delete

• bloglines.com
• grabawine.co.nz
• iscrybe.com
• rummble.com

And some I hadn’t visited for so long they died in the interim:

• dreamledger.com
• engagd.com
• gleamd.com
• iyomu.com
• muxtape.com

As well as the inevitable sites I couldn’t get into to delete my account (must have another go at it):

• odeo.com
• pmog.com

You know what? That feels a whole heap better. I think this sort of review is something that might need repeated on a six-monthly basis…