As part of my daily job I join every sin­gle ser­vice on the inter­net I become aware of.

I think that I have some­thing like 200 accounts out there and I have been using most of them for no more that a cou­ple of days. Dif­fer­ent rea­sons for this:

  • No inter­est in the ser­vice for my job.
  • No real per­sonal inter­est in the service.
  • Bad ser­vice.
  • Already seen.
  • and so on…

If you look at new web ser­vices you will find that you can join them in no more than a cou­ple of clicks. That’s cool.

What I find very strange is that for the most part of these ser­vices there is no way to delete your account. You will stay there for­ever even if you will not sign in for months.

I am just won­der­ing why this happens.

At the end of the day it should be very easy to delete an account. Why don’t I’m not allowed to can­cel my account if, for any rea­son, I don’t want to use the ser­vice any­more? Does the total num­ber of users impresses your investors? Don’t you have to answer the ques­tion “How many ACTIVE users do you have on your service?”

At some degree that should be an inno­v­a­tive fea­ture: acknowl­edge the fact that some­one may dis­like your service.

Why do I blog this? I have just cre­ated an account on Twit­ter and I was delighted by the fact that I can can­cel my account at any point in time. This does not hap­pen very often, but it should.

Related posts:

  1. links for 2006-​11-​22
  2. Con­sumer behaviour