What if you want to withdraw from Facebook, Twitter or...?

Here's a question... What if you want to withdraw from a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter or Blogger... Nah, you wouldn't want to leave Twitter or Blogger, so let's make believe we're talking about Facebook or LinkedIn. Suppose you not only want to remove yourself from the site but also "want to make sure your information doesn't last forever in cyberspace."

Fortunately, Shivani Vora of USA Today answered the question for us as follows in an article entitled Quick Fix: A Way to Be Less Social; the article is abridged here.

Solution: Signing up for a social-networking site is straightforward, but removing yourself from one can be less obvious. Each site has its own procedure for eliminating a profile, but you can generally find your way out by looking under the "Settings" tab on the home page and choosing the option to delete your account, or going to the "Help" tab and searching for "delete account." Some networks give you the choice to suspend your account, which means your content remains on the site.

Facebook gives members an option to de-activate accounts, which means your profile information is saved and still on the Web. To remove it for good, you need to submit a request by going into the Help section at the bottom of the page. Search for "delete account" and follow the instructions. Other sites are more direct when it comes to deleting profiles. LinkedIn gives users an option to immediately close their accounts by going into the "Accounts and Settings" tab.

Caveat: It can take up to a few weeks for your profile to be removed from search engines such as Google so don't expect your information to be wiped out right away from the Web.

How to Search This Blog... (or any blogspot site)

Friends have asked me how to search for particular articles - such as book or music reviews - within this blog. I had no idea until about a week ago when a fellow blogger explained it to me.

In the upper left corner of this sample blog page, you'll see a blank white rectangular box. This is where you can enter a search term phrase or keywords such as: bob dylan, dave mason, small faces, jenny dalton, green day, great central government, munchy, peet's, starbucks, bold coffee or some other topic and then click on Search Blog (earlier Search This Blog). The multiple results for these topics will then appear as one long web page. Pretty cool.

I feel like I should keep writing except there is nothing more to say, it's as simple as this.

We are experiencing some technical difficulties...

The Blogger network, which hosts this site and other Blogspot sites, had an outage last night at 11:00 PDT, 2:00 a.m on the east coast. Some Blogspot sites have experienced problems since the service was resumed. A number of sites, like this one, can only be accessed using the full Universal Resource Locator (URL) address; this means you have to type in the "www" part in your browser.

Based on what I'm reading, some bloggers cannot currently put up new posts - so these sites may appear to be inactive - and a few others cannot add photographs, so those posts will be plainer than usual.

Fortunately, I can still post photos so here's a nice black & white one of the moon over San Francisco's Coit Tower. Let's hope that things soon get back to normal at Blogger so that we can all return to business as usual. Until then, in the words of a Small Faces song, we're all "waiting here in Patience."

Photo: flickr (km6xo); click on the photo to see a slightly larger version.