By Sanjana Sanghi:
A frantic scan through the Facebook friend list or Twitter followers to see if our social status is intact seems to occupy a fairly integral part of our mornings. That number shouldn’t fall, regardless of whether it comprises of hundreds of people whom we’ve hardly ever met, and rarely ever spoken to. To aid and perpetuate this helpless obsession with social media, the Who Deleted Me App does everything we’d like.
The App which is available for iOS and Android, also comes as a browser extension. It not only tells us whether we have been unfriended, but also if the user has deactivated their account. As though this weren’t sufficient, it gives us details of when all those on our friend list logged in last. Essentially, it is making our social media experience all the more immersive and time consuming. It seems to be a teaser placed strategically in the human need and greed conflict wherein we’d love to click that unfriend button for someone on our friend list and get an undeniable thrill out of doing so, but at the same time want to know the very second if we are the victim of such an act.
There’s no doubt that being unfriended on Facebook today seems to be considered the ultimate insult one can get, and this desire to know who may have decided to slack us off has clearly translated into the Who Deleted Me App to have 500,000 users. Back in February, Facebook sent out a notice to the app’s Exeter-based creator Anthony Kuske stating that the app and browser extension were creating a negative user experience. The App however didn’t seem to heed it at all and instead came out with a new and improved version.