I orig­i­nally stated in my opt-out post that I was going to delete my social media pro­files on July 1. The point for leav­ing my accounts active for a cou­ple of weeks was to allow friends to cap­ture my con­tact infor­ma­tion. The more I thought about it, though, most of my friends have my con­tact info. I shot mes­sages to a few peo­ple I wanted to make sure had my con­tact info. I fig­ure every­one who don’t can find me online. I am not that hard to find.

With that out of the way, I got down to the busi­ness of clos­ing accounts. I started yes­ter­day with Last.fm, Spo­tify, Rdio, Google+ on my Google Apps email. Today, I fol­lowed through with the biggies.

Inter­est­ingly, when I did my social media sab­bat­i­cal in 2010, only Face­book would allow you to deac­ti­vate, but not fully delete your account. Twit­ter has now jumped on board with the deactivation-before-deletion wait­ing period. My Face­book will offi­cially be deleted in 14 days. Twit­ter makes you wait 30 days before your account is deleted. I under­stand why there’s a delay. Some­times peo­ple make rash deci­sions, and the wait­ing period is a safety net. As for me…I just feel lighter hav­ing ini­ti­ated the process.

As dis­cussed in the opt-out post, I plan to keep my Google+ account active on my Gmail address. I have, how­ever, going to take every­one out of my Cir­cles except fam­ily mem­bers. I will no longer post any­thing publicly.

On a nerdy aside — It’s kind of cool to watch the ani­ma­tion when you delete a Cir­cle. It drops down and rolls out of sight. Bye Bye.