I sign up for a lot of beta web applications. A lot of beta web applications. Usually I use them only a few times and don’t go back. (As someone who would someday like to release web applications, this does give me pause… mental note, your web app MUST make a fantastic first impression).
Recently I got a couple automated messages from some of these reminding me that they existed, so I thought I’d go ahead and delete my account.
Guess what? Surprise, you can’t! There was no built in feature, in either, to delete or cancel your account.
Now, as a developer I can understand this; you’re excited about developing your application, and you’re hoping to get more and more users — not to have your current users abandon you. Even if it occurs to you to allow users to delete their profile, it’s not a feature that is likely to make the top of your list for any given iteration. A “Delete Profile” feature? No, first I need to add tagging and customized RSS feeds and tag clouds and a microblog….
Check that impulse. Add this feature. Add it first.
Why? Because then when I go in to delete my account, I’ll find the link to do so, and I’ll be happy. Then, should your application explode in popularity and I one day decide to give it another chance, my memories of it will be positive, rather than negative.
I first signed up on Facebook in early 2006. I didn’t use it much, and IIRC it was still open only to college students, it hadn’t yet opened up to The Great Unwashed. I don’t socialize much within college, so it just didn’t have a lot of value to me… so I canceled my account.
I went in, looked for the link to delete my profile, found it, and deleted. End of story. I did decide to give Facebook another chance when they opened it up to the world, making it seem a little more useful to me. I haven’t thought about that since, until today when I tried to delete two accounts in other applications, and found that there was no way to do so.
Let me delete my account.
That’s a good point I never really thought about. I just create the account and leave it. I created a flickr account when it first came out, then never used it, then Mike from Blip at SXSW this year said… DO YOU HAVE A FLICKR ACCOUNT?? and suddenly the account I had created five months previous became useful.
So here’s another question for you: if you delete the account, should the account name be freed up for someone else, or should it be retired?
Duh, sorry, not flickr, TWITTER. See, even **I** get them all confused.
A similar thing happened to me with PC Magazine. I subscribed to one of their sweepstakes, using my gmail adddress with a “+pcmag” before the @ sign (so I know who’s spamming me - like the guys at Performancing once did).
Well, that was when I still had a PC. I now own a Mac, so decided to unsubscribe from PC Magazine’s list. Turns out I can’t.
While my “+pcmag” address was accepted when I signed up, it seems the unsubscribe form will not accept email addresses with a “+” sign in them.
I’ve tried contacting anyone I can at PC Magazine to no avail. So, I marked them as spam and that’s where all their newsletters end up now.