Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook users are saying that they are being blocked from sharing Seppukoo.com with friends. As mentioned in our previous post, Seppukoo.com offers ritual suicide for the virtual selves of Facebook users by deactivating their account, giving them a memorial page and informing all their Facebook friends. But it can all be restored with internet speed by logging in to Facebook again.
Simon Axten, spokesman for Facebook, said in an e-mail to the L.A. Times Tech Blog that Facebook has an automated system that blocks links for known spam, malware and phishing sites. So it must be nothing personal, right?
Well we think the idea is funny. It’s named for the ancient Japanese samurai act of “seppuku,” in which the samurai would voluntarily kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of their enemies.
“As the seppuku restores the samurai’s honour as a warrior, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body,” the site says.
Because it’s a spoof, the design and layout of Seppukoo.com is strikingly similar to Facebook – though Seppukoo is red and gray, and features paintings of sword-wielding samurai instead of profile photos.
The site was produced by an Italian “imaginary art group,” called Les Liens Invisibles (translated from French: The Invisible Links). When asked for an interview, Guy McMusker, art director of the group, replied in an e-mail that Les Liens Invisibles couldn’t do it on the phone. The group couldn’t speak, he said, “because of its invisible nature.”
But he insists that Seppukoo.com was not started to attack Facebook. In fact, Les Liens Invisibles has a Facebook page.
“We’re not Luddites,” McMusker said.
But once he discovered that any mention of the site has been blocked since Dec 10th, he wrote in an e-mail, “we’re studying a counter-strategy.”
Tags: Facebook, Internet Speed