Facebook Suicide

You can bet your "[agency].gov/open Web page" (refer to bottom of page 2 in the Office of Management and Budget's open government directive) that agencies are going to employ social media tools.

So somebody should write a memo to warn feds about Seppukoo, the social media app that will kind of literally kill your other social media app.

Seppuku, for those of you not obsessed with all things samurai or too lazy to hit up the Wikipedia entry, is a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment (ew). Seppukoo is a means of deactivating your Facebook profile that offers the added benefit of replacing said profile with a customizable memorial page.

Seppuku was thought to be more honorable than dying at the hands of one's enemies. Seppukoo talks about liberating the digital body, but it's actually a game, because every time someone in your Facebook network commits Seppukoo, you get points and increase your Seppukoo rank.

It's probably unlikely that Seppukoo drives anyone away from their Facebook account (at least not for more than a few days -- you can log back into Facebook to reactivate your account if you are bored of being digitally dead). But the problem remains that not many federal managers are using social media tools.

For them, I recommend spreadtweet, because I think federal managers might feel more comfortable using Twitter if the interface looked like an Excel spreadsheet.