I received word today that Entrustet has officially launched its new digital afterlife service. While we do not endorse any one service we’re pleased to see another strong player in this growing space. Details below from the press release.

Entrustet (www.entrustet.com) today announces its services that securely and legally enable users to delete or designate heirs for digital assets (including email, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, PayPal and more), with new features to further help users protect and pass on personal information after death. Entrustet is the first to offer a complete solution for individuals, lawyers and companies to ensure that these accounts are transferred or deleted according to customers’ wishes.

Features:

Account Guardian – The free flagship service allows users to assign an executor and multiple heirs to inherit or delete all digital assets.

• List all digital assets including photos, email, social networks accounts
• Nominate up to 10 heirs to inherit assets
• Store personal documents – one document for free, each additional is $1 per document/per year
  • As a premium add-on service, users looking to back up all files on a hard drive are referred to data backup partner Mozy.

Additional Services:

• Lawyer Directory – The Lawyer Directory serves as a referral service for Entrustet users. Entrustet has partnered with estate planning lawyers throughout the country who understand digital estate planning needs and how to incorporate digital assets into new or existing wills and trusts.
• Double verification – Before facilitating the transfer or deleting a member’s digital assets, Entrustet requires a death certificate from the Digital Executor and then verifies the information with the local records office.
• LegalZoom legal protection – When signing up for Account Guardian, members receive a printed summary of digital assets, last wishes, heirs and digital executor.  For security reasons, any usernames and passwords will not be included in the document. Members can then turn the form into a legally binding document with a do-it-yourself will through partner LegalZoom for an estimated cost of $60-$129.

Upcoming Features:

• Account Incinerator – Entrustet offers a service that will keep designated personal assets private
  • Annual fee of $19.99 per account/per year
  • Users upload account information they would like to remain private after they die. These accounts will be immediately deleted by Entrustet once a member’s death is double verified.
  • Account Incinerator will be available in Summer 2010

Corporate Partners:

Entrustet’s Corporate Partner Program provides online companies with a free, simple and effective service to monitor member deaths across their user base, as well as users’ individual last wishes for their accounts. Entrustet has also created a widget to help networks estimate the number of member death rates per year.

Entrustet is working with a number of established sites including BroadJam, a Web-based promotional tool and service site for independent musicians, the music industry and fans around the world.

Perhaps a testament to the growing awareness of digital afterlife issues, a number of events have sprung up recently ostensibly focused on the topic.  Here are the ones that I have learned about.  Let me know if you have one that isn’t listed here.

HCI at the End of Life
April 10th, 2010
Workshop at CHI 2010 restricted to those who submitted position papers. Primarily an academic audience.
Cost: $175 plus variable costs for CHI.

Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age
April 17th, 2010
One day seminar at the National University of Singapore. Again, a primarily academic audience.
Cost: free

Digital Death Day
May 20th, 2010
This event is a one-day un-conference co-located with the 10th Internet Identity Conference in Mountain View, CA. It’s audience seems to be primarily professional.
Cost: $75

While I have some academic pursuits, the exclusivity of the CHI workshop and the distance required to visit Singapore will keep me away. I’m seriously considering Digital Death Day. It looks to be the the most relevant and accessible to me.

The British Library recently launched the UK Web Archive, a repository designed to archive UK Web sites for posterity. Their site states that it “contains sites that reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK.” The archive presently contains approximately 6,000 Web sites and users can nominate sites for inclusion. In the nomination form users are asked to submit a justification for inclusion with examples “a typical business blog, a prize winning site, representative of Internet culture or even humorous.”

It makes perfect sense that an archiving service, like the UK Web Archive, should limit its collection. With limited resources, they must consider the greater desire for patrons to view the content in the future. At our Core Conversation at SXSW 2009, one participant stated that you need not worry about the digital afterlife if you weren’t significant enough for the Library of Congress. While that’s true for larger archives, it’s not true for niche audiences. Consider that your descendants might want to view your content, even though it is not significant enough for a large archive. Also consider small social communities or communities of practice. Perhaps content is significant to one of these smaller groups, but not to the larger archive.

I’m excited to see more digital archives come about to archive niche content. And while the UK Web Archive is more niche than a general Web archive, I think there’s great potential for even more Web content to be preserved for posterity.

Photo: I couldn’t help but use this “archive of flowers” from Aureusbay on Flickr.

Hi Friends.  I’ve submitted an idea to speak at Ignite here at home in Raleigh.  I would appreciate your support by voting for my idea.  Here’s the summary:

Last Tweet and testament? Email from the grave? Funerals in World of Warcraft? When you die, your identity will ascend into the cloud—the Internet, that is. But you won’t be around to push the buttons on your Facebook, Twitter, Email, or Web sites. You’ll need somebody or something to do it for you. Learn how planning today can secure your own (digital) immortality.

For those of you who don’t know, the Ignite format is different.  Speakers get exactly five minutes and 20 slides to say whatever they would like.  This seems like a great opportunity to raise awareness of digital afterlife issues to a captivated audience.  Thanks for the support.

While doing some research recently, I started to think more about the  fields of study that together form a foundation for the digital afterlife.  I have always maintained that this is a multi-faceted topic, but I didn’t realize how true that statement was.

Identity – online content is a projection of our identity into the digital world.  E-mails, photos, connections and conversations provide a corpus of data allowing for unprecedented study and preservation of identity.

Human-computer interaction – the study of how we interact with computers.  Closely linked to identity, computers have become our companions in life.  They’re contents provide records of our thinking, communications and pleasures.

Estate planning – the traditional practice of law that helped individuals plan the disposition of their assets.  Our digital assets are becoming increasingly valuable.  It’s time for a legally-sound process to protect them and allow us to pass them along to the next generation.

Funeral service - end of life care and remembrance.  The way we remember and honor the decreased is changing.  Online memorials and gatherings are an increasing occurrence and are no less real than their offline counterparts.

Archives and preservation – archivists have worked for years to collect and preserve tangible information for centuries.  Now in an digital world they are working to collect and preserve not just physical, but “born digital” assets as well.

I’m sure that I missed a few.  Can you think of any others?  Comment it up, folks.

The Washington Post just published an article about the digital afterlife from Mike Rosenwald.  It’s a great overview of the industry and provides a few personal stories from those affected by death on the Internet.

Jeremy Toeman, founder of Legacy Locker, was quoted in the article.

“We’re in an era now where people are really going to have to pay attention to what their online assets are,” Toeman said. “Five years ago, that terminology — digital assets — didn’t even make sense. Now it does.”

I couldn’t agree with his statement more.  I’m excited to see what will happen in the months to come for the growing industry of digital afterlife services.  Earlier this month I wrote some predictions for 2010, and the points that Rosenwald, Toeman and others make in the article are further proof that we’ll see more growth this year.

As an aside, I’m pleased to learn that Legacy Locker has over 10,000 subscribers.  It’s one of the first signs I’ve seen of success in the industry.  I hope that others are seeing similar success.

It’s that time of year and there’s one thing that the Internet is not short of–predictions about what will happen in 2010.  And like most others out there, we have an opinion too.  Let’s take a brief look back at 2009.

Without doubt, 2009 was the emerging year for the digital afterlife.  Since we started keeping track in June, the digital afterlife has appeared in blogs and the media nearly 60 times, and I’m sure we missed a few articles along the way. 2009 also brought a deluge of online services that help individuals manage their digital afterlife or memorialize their loved ones.  We didn’t keep up with the launch date for each new service, but there we learned of at least 10 new services in 2009.  With all of this buzz it’s safe to say that more and more people are thinking about the digital afterlife.

So what’s next?  In 2010 awareness of digital afterlife issues will increase and the industry will continue to grow at a rapid pace.  Trendwatching.com says that the digital afterlife is a part of an overall trend of “profile myning,” or taking control of your own profiles.  Internet users are increasingly aware of their online identity and are taking steps to control it.

With personal profiles (which are the nucleus of one’s personal brand) representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one’s digital estate to trusted others. – trendwatching.com

Standards
There is not yet a best practice for dealing with deceased users’ content.  Practices vary across sites and many sites do not have a standard practice in place.  We expect to see efforts form around standardization, as more attorneys and estate planners gain interest in the subject.

More content
The idea that personal computers should primarily use local storage (aka your hard drive) is becoming a thing of the past.  Flickr is great for photos and Google Docs is starting to perform as well as desktop-based software.  The recent Chrome OS more or less solidifies the fact that the browser is the new operating system.  This trend means more content in the cloud that will require afterlife planning.

Competition
The digital afterlife industry is still very young and there’s no clear leader.  Right now, services can roughly be divided into three categories,  estate planning, posthumous messaging or online memorials. We suspect that like any emerging industry, the competition will heat up and these services will work to differentiate from others.

Increased digital component in funerals
Hong Kong recently turned to online memorials to help deal with the shortage of burial plots.  Funeral homes across the US are using DVD slide shows or other multimedia during services.  With some places replacing graves with online memorials and technology making its way into the funeral home, we expect more to come on this front.  Too bad Eternal Space didn’t hold on longer.

In summary 2010 will be another emerging year, but will be full of exciting developments for the industry.  We’ll be here at The Digital Beyond to keep you informed.

Photo credit to Atomische on Flickr.

With the recent increase in visits to this site, I’ve been explaining its purpose more often in conversation with others. Generally speaking those who are technically-minded understand the issues with digital death and are surprised that they hadn’t considered them before. That epiphany is my favorite moment in any conversation about this. But I’ve talked with more people recently who don’t get it. One person today told me this “I think of it just like I think of what happens to my body: I won’t be here to care.” I may have paraphrased that inadvertently due to my memory, but I must say that I completely disagree with that sentiment.

Digital assets are rapidly replacing tangible ones. Consider family photos. These days they are more likely to be digital from the time they’re taken. Archivists refer to this as a “born-digital” asset. These born-digital assets, in this case digital photographs, are family heirlooms, a vital part of your identity. Passing these heirlooms to the next generation is not just a luxury, it’s an integral part of identity preservation. We’ve been doing this for ages. By passing an object of our identity along, we can leave a story or memory behind. It’s important to know how your survivors will obtain your born-digital assets, because they won’t find a drawer of printed photos in your residence, they’ll have to go looking on your computer or in the cloud.

The issue of identity preservation is just one of many others.  What about access to vital information like emails or web hosting accounts?  How about the necessity to delete some content, to hide things you wouldn’t want others to know?  I could probably think of a million other reasons why this issue is important, but the bottom line is that the more digital assets you have (and it’s growing, trust me) the problem will only grow.

To that thought, I’d like to hear some of the reasons you’re considering the digital afterlife.  Comment it up, folks.

Many of you likely want to know what you can do to plan for your own digital afterlife. It’s something important to think about and we’re glad you’re here to get started.

Step one: Define your assets
A good first step is to inventory your online assets. Going through this process will not only result in a working list, the process will help you understand exactly how many assets you have. You’ll find more than you thought of beforehand.

Step two: Decide your wishes
Now that you have a list, go through it and decide what you would like to happen to each asset. Maybe you want it deleted, maybe you want it archived or perhaps you want it left alone. In any case, decide what you want to happen. It might also be a good idea to check the terms of service for any Web site for which you have a log in to see if they’ve already made some decisions for you.

Step three: Choose one or more executors
You won’t be around to push the buttons, so you’ll need a survivor to do it for you. Asking a trusted friend or relative to help is essential to having your wishes honored. Think about who is knowledgeable enough to help you out with your assets. Perhaps one person comes to mind or perhaps you want to divide tasks up amongst several people. We have more information about selecting executors here.

Step four: Document your wishes
Finally document your wishes and put them in a place that’s accessible by your executor(s). There are many online services that will help you out with this part. You may be able to do this yourself using a safe-deposit box or other security mechanism, but a service might make it easier or more secure for you. It’s important to think about how to best secure your information and passwords. Whatever you do, don’t list them in your will as that will become public record.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you make these decisions carefully and with the input of your relatives. If you have any concerns it’s never a bad idea to consult your attorney.

John Romano and Evan Carroll, creators of The Digital Beyond, appeared on WRAL in Raleigh, NC giving some helpful advice about preparing for the digital afterlife. You can read the full story online at www.wral.com.

We also have a checklist to help you plan for your digital afterlife.

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