It’s also worth stating that there’s a pattern here. Facebook created the memorialized profile around the same time that they began to suggest friends or ask you to reconnect with inactive users. When users complained about reminders of their deceased friends, Facebook acted on the issue accordingly. I’m sure that Twitter faced the same complaints. Nudges from our friend, Adele McAlear and Gizmodo probably didn’t hurt either.

Another friend of ours, Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Legacy Locker, proposes that the policy isn’t good enough. I’m inclined to agree.

So let’s break the policy down. I like to evaluate policies for deceased users along three categories: notification, verification and action.

I’m pleased with the notification method that Twitter has provided. I believe that email or a web form is sufficient, so I applaud them for allowing fax and postal mail as well. Their verification process seems alright, too. While not 100% secure, verification via obituary or news article seems fair. My dissent with the policy lies in the actions that Twitter will take.

Twitter allows families of the deceased two options: remove the account and/or provide the family with an archive of public tweets. I have to commend them for providing the archive. That’s more than Facebook will do. The blog post regarding Facebook’s policy is littered with comments about losing the wall posts of the deceased.

Jeremy mentioned that the policy lacked the idea of desired intent and I agree there as well. I would say, however, that their policy doesn’t specifically exclude that concept. If a user asks their digital executor to either delete or archive their Twitter account, they would be in luck. That said, the ideal situation would allow Twitter users to specify their wishes before their death, perhaps in their account settings.

I have to ask why deletion and archiving are the only options. Why not allow profiles to stay in place with a memorialized indicator? Perhaps even dedicate space on a user’s page to replies that they receive following death. There are opportunities here to design a much better memorial to the user, rather than ushering their profile away as if they never existed.

To summarize my points quickly: Having a policy is better than not. Users should have a choice in their accounts’ disposition. Social networks need to shift from dealing with death to designing for it. Their services hold great potential as memorials and, out of respect for their users, they should embrace it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Let us know what you think.

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.

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.

It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

A seemingly authoritative personal profile. In case you missed it, that’s exactly the point. Some time in the future someone may want to know about you. Provided that enough of your content survives, this is the type of profile they will find. Even the best data mining technologies lack the ability to distinguish the content of several people who share the same name. The profile is thus an aggregate profile of several different people.

This is a problem. If you’re to be remembered for you you are, then your identity can’t be confused with others. This example is a reminder that you can’t rely upon the cloud to handle the sorting. It takes planning and effort on your part and that of your survivors.

When researching the various services that deal with the digital afterlife, a certain pattern started to emerge.  I call this pattern the three stages of the digital afterlife: missed, remembered, forgotten.  I’ll address each in that order, naturally.

Missed

This is the stage that occurs right after death.  You’ve left a void and your survivors need to step in and handle your final affairs.  Things like closing accounts and distributing assets.  Online services exist that allow you to share vital information that your survivors will need and send final messages to them.

Remembered

Once your affairs are in order, your survivors will remember you.  Tangible items like photographs and your headstone will help them do so.  This stage lasts from the time your affairs are in order until those who knew you have also passed.  A few online services help you or your survivors create an online memorial, but there are much fewer than those which address the first stage.

Forgotten

At this point, your identity, both online and offline has passed.  Nobody remembers you first hand and what remains of your existence is a relic of a former time.  Online content lacks context, is stored in legacy formats and hasn’t been curated in years.  As far as I’m aware, there are no services addressing this stage.  This is where the real potential exists in this industry.  Imagine being able to examine the online content of your ancestors and know who they were and what they thought.  I’m not sure how this will work, but we’re here to talk about it.