At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future.<p>Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net.<p>Sounds strange, but that's the trend.
I wanted to know beforehand how to delete a Facebook account permanently<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703</a><p><a href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit_facebook_and_delete_your.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit...</a><p>and shared log-in information with immediate family members, so that we can decide what stays up and what gets deleted if one of us dies.<p>Based on other Internet businesses I have dealt with over the years, I think it is a lot more likely that my Facebook info will be permanently lost than that I will die while Facebook is still a going business, but I could be wrong.
Hm:<p><i>When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article.</i><p>So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer.<p>---<p>[1] Only <i>tasteful</i> gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is going to require a very careful touch.<p>[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press. This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for free.<p>Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper". Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.
I am torn on this. For some folks, this will be a wonderful persistent reminder of the deceased and a place to leave memorial messages. For other folks, it could become an awkward persistent reminder that just makes it hard to grieve and move on.
I remember the feeling of stumbling into the profile of someone that had passed away, IMO it's better if they'd just allow family/friends to shut it down and have a way to backup the photos/updates.
This seems really coincidental considering that Mark Zuckerberg got a question about what facebook was doing to preserve our data for the next 2,000 years.<p>His response was "I like thinking in the long-term, but not that long-term". Anyone else get the impression that this is a compromise?