'Friends' no more? For some, social networking has become too much of a good thing

Facebook reports that it has 400 million active users worldwide. Make that 399,999,999. Laura LeNoir is done.

"I feel better, I feel lighter, I got my privacy back," says LeNoir, 42, an office manager at an educational software company in Birmingham, Ala., who logged off a few weeks ago. "People say, 'You'll be back.' But I read more, walk the dogs more. I'll be fine."

As the social networking train gathers momentum, some riders are getting off.

Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online "friends" who aren't really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. But if there's a common theme to their exodus, it's the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the "real" out of life.

"When I first closed my Facebook account, I felt disconnected from the world and missed the constant updates," says Leanna Fry, 32, of Provo, Utah, who is teaching English in Erzurum, Turkey. She signed off after feeling harassed by strangers. "But I've discovered I don't have to know what hundreds of people are doing. Now I have more time for people who really matter in my life."

Even super-connected celebrities are bolting. Disney pop siren Miley Cyrus quit Twitter last fall, followed by British singer Lily Allen. Both women said the site was proving a distraction from their relationships. Allen signed off with "I am a neo-Luddite, goodbye."

That desire to unplug has made an unexpected success out of websites such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo (a play on the Japanese word for "suicide"), free sites that automate and turbocharge the otherwise laborious manual process of scrapping your online self.

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine — where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem ("181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed") — has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site's small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the "art project" for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

"We are not anti-social-networking," says Langelaar, noting that the program was conceived for a party the lab threw a year ago to encourage face-to-face interaction. "We do, however, feel things are getting so messy in that world that (the sites) just get in the way of people living their lives."