"Hey bro, it's John. Just returning your Facebook poke."

Are you tired of finishing your workdays with that sick, sinking feeling of not having achieved very much? Annoyed at feeling scattered and distracted by the effort of keeping abreast of online news, gossip, conversations and viral content? Can’t help staying up late into the night blearily checking your Twitter replies, updating your Facebook status or LOLing at Bert, Ernie and Keyboard Cat covering Marky Mark?

You’re not alone. The idea of abstaining from social networking – or quitting the websites altogether – is gaining currency as users weary of the way these services eat into their lives.

Last year, Facebook users began to grow disillusioned with the service – some because of concerns over its privacy settings and the way it uses personal data; some because they grew tired of a culture of public narcissism; some because it’s a massive time-waster.

“Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?” asked New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan.

Well, that’s what’s happened to MySpace. In December 2008, Facebook and MySpace were neck and neck, but while Facebook gained 200 million (mostly older) users in 2009 (an increase of 3.99 per cent), MySpace membership dropped by 11.15 per cent and Bebo by 15.41 per cent. This Onion News Network story about the “ruins of the Friendster civilisation” is satirical because it’s true.

Over the past week, Facebook has decided to block the IP addresses of two websites that allow their subscribers to automatically delete their Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine claims it “lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.”

Seppukoo uses the metaphor of seppuku, the samurai art of honourable suicide. “As the Seppuku restores samurai’s honor as a warrior, in the same way, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction” in order to “rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.”

Facebook has sent Seppukoo a cease-and-desist letter (PDF link), and has similarly accused Web 2.0 Suicide Machine of violating its terms of service by accessing Facebook users’ login details. “Facebook provides the ability for people who no longer want to use the site to either deactivate their account or delete it completely,” the company’s statement said.

The Enthusiast thought perhaps Facebook might have found the sites’ overt suicide rhetoric more of a terms-of-service violation, especially considering the cases of online suicide pacts and people committing suicide live on a webcam. For those considering quitting their online presences because of stress, anxiety, depression or other personal problems, The Enthusiast believes a far healthier website to look up is beyondblue, the national depression initiative.

But social-media quitting is shaping up to be the big online media trend for 2010. Stephen Fry, who has more than a million Twitter followers, has just announced he’s taking a break to concentrate on writing the follow-up to his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot.

“This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do,” Fry told his online fans. “I must deliver a book to my publishers by the end of April or my soul and testicles will be forfeit.”

If Fry quit for productivity, Trent Reznor deleted his Twitter account last July because it exposed his followers to troll-tweets. “In a reasonably moderated community, these people can be made to vanish – on Twitter, it’s a free-for-all – hence they flock there,” Reznor told the Nine Inch Nails fan forum.

Teen sexpot Miley Cyrus quit Twitter in October, posting a JJ Fad-esque video in which she raps that she’s moving from “living for moments” to “living for people”, and she was tired of providing gossip websites with their ‘news’.

But when the bonkers but always entertaining Courtney Love shut down her Twitter, it was due to legal action from fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir, who sued for libel after Love posted messages on MySpace and Twitter alleging that Simorangkir was a drug dealer, a racist, a homophobe, an unfit mother (real pot-and-kettle stuff) and a “nasty lying hosebag thief.” Luckily, Love still had her Facebook page, where she posted another characteristic rant about losing custody of her daughter.

John Mayer has 2.9 million followers on Twitter, which made his decision to abstain from social networking for the first week of January a potentially influential one. On 30 December, Mayer devised a plan for a “digital cleanse” that he likened to defragmenting an overloaded hard drive.

Mayer doesn’t advocate going cold turkey from the internet for a week, though. It’s actually quite doable. Mayer proposes using mobile phones only for calls, rather than emailing, social networking and texting. Texts must be replied to by voice, and emails returned from a desktop or laptop computer. Reading or posting on social networking and gossip websites – “you know what they are” – is completely banned for the week.

For professional reasons we can’t follow this plan completely, but since the new year I have abstained from my personal Twitter account, Facebook, reading blogs or posting on my own blogs, and reading my treasured collection of RSS feeds labelled “Fun & Gossip”. I don’t miss the stressful, hamster-wheel sensation of trying to keep up with a constant flow of information. However, the adverse effects include being mocked for taking life-coaching advice from John Mayer.