Facebook has threatened one of the best ideas online with its legal hounds unless it closes shop. SuicideMachine.com allows people to kill their social profiles on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn with the push of a button instead of hunting through all these sites to do so manually.

Social networks are powerful tools for communications and sharing, and pretty much everyone on the Committee uses one or more of them regularly. I’ve got profiles on 12 or more. Four I actually look at regularly. But it’s easy to see how the habit can get out of control, and the ability to opt out should always be in plain sight, but unfortunately it’s usually buried somewhere under a mound of setting options. Suicidemachine.org’s aim is to bring the option back to the forefront.

I attempted to kill my long dorment Myspace page as the site has grown disgustingly bad and I haven’t looked at it in about a year now. As of this writing, a message pops up saying the service is down due to too many service requests, but one wonders whether it has anything to do with the Cease & Desist order sent by Facebook legal bullies.

Facebook releases its API and pages to the public. Upon doing so, it should realize that it can’t chase down everyone who uses them in their own way and perhaps not the exact liking or profit margin expectations of the company. You’d think they were now owned by Rupert Murdoch or something.

The idea behind the suicide machine is to create a quick, painless option for opting out of multiple social networks at once, and in these modern times when people are growing more worried about who has control over their personal information, allowing tools like this to continue can only help people feel more in control and more comfortable in using online tools.

Trying to kill projects that help people leave a website can only cast suspicion on Facebook and any others attempting to bully developers with court cases. This is another example of how censorship is not limited to words and images that express ideas, but can also apply to the programming code that implements them.