I wasn't going to write about this last week as I expected nothing to come if it. But today I learned that the situation has escalated.

Just to recap, a new service calling themselves the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine lets users commit virtual suicide on social networking sites such as Myspace, Linked, Twitter and of course Facebook. The only one to have a problem with this is Facebook, who have shown their real colours by initially asking the site to stop providing the service to Facebook members, but now they've sent in the Lawyers to do the talking.

W2SM has proudly displayed the cease and desist order they received from Facebook which you can read here (pdf).

Facebooks beef W2SM is that they are these points taken from the letter:

It has come to Facebook's attention that Moddr, through its Web site located at www.suicidemachine.org, is
(1) soliciting Facebook user log-in information,
(2) accessing Facebook accounts that belong to others,
(3) scraping content from Facebook,
(4) sending unauthorized commercial communications,
(5) falsely asserting that Moddr has partnered with Facebook, and (6) infringing Facebook's intellectual property rights on and through www.suicidemachine.org.

My take on this is that Facebook feels threatened by anything that can shrink their user base, but is disguising the fact behind the piss-weak C&D letter nonsense.

I for one think it's a great service and can go along way to liberating people from their computers. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.