The Digital Beyond has added a comparison chart to their Digital Death Services List. Visitors to the site can now scan down our handy list and see at a glance if a service offers:

• Digital Estate Planning
• Posthumous Emails
• Online Memorials

“We wanted to provide a chart to help make finding a service easier.” said Evan Carroll. “The list of companies offering services in this space is growing at such a rapid pace. We simply needed something to tell them apart. Oh, and there’s more to come. Stay tuned.”

Robert Calem at Techlicious wrote a great article titled “What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?” He quotes John, Evan and Nathan Dosch extensively as he discusses the complexities of terms of service for Google Yahoo and Facebook. Next he gives an overview of several digital afterlife services including Legacy Locker, DataInherit, and Entrustet.

It happens. Computers left behind by a loved one become locked boxes. Accounts become frozen. Treasured digital assets are lost. Now a new service is available that helps survivors unlock digital content.

Digital Estate Services (http://www.digitalestateservices.com) is here to help. Their service can help unlock local files, recover user names and passwords for online accounts, and find important documents from a spouse or loved one’s computer in the event that they didn’t leave access.

We are beginning to see the digitization of cemeteries. Personal Rosetta Stone is a company that sells a addition to headstones that connects mobile users in the cemetery to digital archives on the Web.

This connection between digital archives and headstones provides the missing link between the final physical remains of a human and a digital record of their life. It is a logical enhancement of the traditional cemetery experience and bereavement process. It also creates interesting possibilities for people researching their ancestors.

http://www.personalrosettastone.com

Expect to see more products that digitally enhance death in the coming years.

A list of events at SXSW that all deal with digital identities and afterlife.

Virtual Interviews: A Chat With Darwin’s Ghost
#syntheticinterview
Ralph Vituccio and John Dessler
Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center
Synthetic Interview is a unique technology that allows people to have a conversation with a character or persona as if that person were present in real-time. The goal is creating immersive experiences, allowing guests to interact with a digital character from either the past, the present or the future.

People Die, Profiles Don’t
#peopledieprofilesdont
Jesse Davis with Entrustet
Talk about companies and how they deal with users deaths. What can websites do to streamline the process of handling the deceased’s wishes for their online accounts?

eSee Technologies
#eSeetech
Ian Mitchell
Augmented Reality device that may serve life loggers and average Web users alike at eseetechnologies.com.

I also saw this article that Apple has hired Richard DeVaul of AWare Technologies who is an expert in heads up technology. Can you say iSee?

What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
#phonehad5senses
Ted Power of Google
The phone in your pocket has the sense of sight (camera), sound (microphone), touch and location. They also have sense of light, proximity, acceleration, orientation. All these senses potentially serve to describe your experiences and enrich your digital identity.

My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
#mylifetaketwo
Panel
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there – but that’s getting harder in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a ”right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?

Have You Planned for Your Digital Afterlife?
Interview with Adel Mcalear
@DigitalLegacy

What’s Your Preference? What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile. Should it:

1. be turned into a memorial
2. be archived
3. be deleted
4. something else?

Let us know what you think.

Once you’re dead and gone – past the time when anyone that you know is alive – will your digital identity remain? Will your future descendants be able to look at your images and videos, read your writing, and get to know what your life was like here on Earth?

Most likely, but currently there is nothing to guarantee that. We would need an institution devoted to maintaining an individual’s digital identity, kind of like a digital cemetery. But instead of cutting the grass and tending flowers, the cemetery will tend your personal data.

There are companies that are beginning to offer services like these. But will the service outlive you? The internet seems to reinvent itself every 5 years so who knows what it will look like in 50. Cemeteries are protected by law, but data is not. Un-plug the computer and the data is gone.

We wonder if this is the next manifestation in our search for immortality or just Cemetery 2.0? For now we’re not sure, but if  the idea of your digital identity outliving you appeals to you, then you need to start thinking about your online life a little differently because everything that you put online may be here for years, or centuries, after your death. Or it may be gone tomorrow.

For now, you need to make sure that there is someone to look after your data after you die. Prepare. Maybe even subscribe to a service. Either way, start thinking about it, because your digital identity will outlive you, one way or another.

Etan Horowitz at the Orlando Sentinel has written two articles that mention The Digital Beyond.

The first, “What happens to your virtual world after you die?” is about the fate of online accounts after death. He talks about how people have been affected and what they can do to protect themselves.

The other is an article “How Facebook, MySpace, Gmail and other handle your accounts when you die” where Etan has written a good guide about how Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Windows Live mail handle death.

Cheers Etan. Spread the word.

Do lifetime Internet bans on individuals (as part of a sentence for breaking the law) amounts to “digital death”? Check out this interesting article by Andrew Moshirnia at Citizens Media Law Project about how the court is using bans as part of sentencing.

We’ve been talking about digital death (and afterlife) in context of the physical death of the individual. But the idea that the court could execute your digital identity is fascinating and potentially scary. Here we are, barely 15 years into the modern Internet, and we considering the revocation of Internet privileges.

But there are greater problems that arise here. The Internet is now breaking away from personal computers, and is finding it’s way to public spaces. It’s also found it’s way to mobile devices. So would this ban VOIP, Internet enabled iPhone apps, and Netflix? Where does it end?

I think that access to the Internet will become more of a right, than a choice. I also expect to see a lot of legislation surrounding this issue in the coming years.

I have two friends, Paul and Richard. They only know each other through me. What happens to that social connection when I die?

Normally all the social connections created through me after I die may slowly decay. As Richard and Paul die, only the physical artifacts (the photos, letters, etc.) remain. 100 years from now, their relationship to me and each other may be more dead and forgotten than I am.

The creation of a social reef.

Richard and Paul are both “friends” of mine on Facebook. When I die, my digital social skeleton (my Facebook profile) will still connect them, as long as my profile is in place.

Digital social skeletons would create a social reef, a skeletal framework like the great coral reefs. Social reefs would be made of millions of social connections devoid of the life that created them. The questions is whether or not the new online skeletons will decay over time, or whether they will become a foundation for a larger social reef to form on top of them.

All I can imagine are digital archeologists a hundred years from now, with super user access, spelunking into the caves of deceased social networks. Running data mining scripts that extract data and illuminate the past.