Keep Alive

Chasing each other in the race for domination, online services make it dead easy to set up new accounts. The problem is when, for whatever reason, we want to close the account. OK, it is again dead easy for paid services. You simply stop paying and after one or two reminders they close. But the story is different when the service is free by design. Like Facebook or Blogger. Or whatever community forum you contribute to.

My lawyers always tell me. The most important clause in any agreement is the termination clause. I have learned this and try to apply whenever possible. But it not always is. Successful examples of me being a smart consumer: contract extensions for mobile phones or cable tv. The same day I sign the extension, I also write a termination letter, dated today + 12 months, or whatever the contract specifies. Why bother dealing with them twice? The ball is on their side and it is them who will have to worry to come back and say "hey, we want you back".

This technique also makes things clean up automatically in the ultimate case when you die. Something not many people think of, but myself, having a software engineer background, whenever I create any object, I always think of when and how it should be destroyed.

The most common technique in use today to clean up unused objects is garbage collection. The system checks if there are any references to the objects living in computer's memory. When there are none, the object is garbage-collected, or putting it simply, destroyed.

Unfortunately the most popular services like Google or Facebook do not offer such garbage collection service. A year ago a very good friend of mine died very prematurely. And I felt very sad, when a couple of months later Facebook sent me a reminder of his next birthday. I would love to save my friends from such announcements.

So here is the idea. The Keep-Alive option. If I do not log into my Google or Facebook account for a specified time period, let it be automatically deleted. Possibly first moved into a staging area, appearing as deleted, but still giving me a chance to "ping" and recover. And when I do not do that, cremate the content, collect the garbage, free the memories and move on. Let all I have online be in my control. Including power of the last wish. Some people probably do not care. But I do.

Wishing you all to keep alive and well through the 2012 and beyond!