It’s hard sometimes to manage your social networking presence. I have three main ones that I use (aside from this blog) – Facebook (friends only), Twitter, and LinkedIn (professional). I just added a fourth – Brazen Careerist – mostly because I read Penelope Trunk’s blog avidly. Realistically though, I have way more – Wakoopa, LastFM, 43 places and others that I’ve probably forgotten about.
I signed up for Xing because I was trying to get in touch with my roommate from boarding school after I lost the card with her email address on it. Now she’s seen the light and joined Facebook, and I have no use for it. So I was trying to delete my profile, there’s no point having another profile on a site I never use, which duplicates the functionality of ones I do! I’m fairly confident that data protection laws mean you have to be able to delete your profile, but in practice it can be hard to work out how. In the end I settled for maxing out my privacy settings but when I got an email from them today (suggesting I upgrade my account!) I noticed a useful link that you can use to ask for help.
So I did, and I was impressed by the quick reply. In case you want it too – to delete your Xing account, go to https://www.xing.com/app/user?op=cancel.