Twitter recently announced its policy for handling the accounts of deceased users. Before I get into my thoughts about the policy, Kudos to them. They’re ahead of the many social websites that do not have any stated policy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Lately I’ve been consumed with research in pursuit of my masters degree and in that I’m hoping to expand the existing body of academic research to include issues surrounding the digital afterlife. It goes without saying that an understanding of online identity is critical to the study of a digital afterlife.

We’ve discussed several times the value of the past, that desire to know more about those who came before you.  And we’ve postulated that the digital age presents an opportunity for individuals to be known by future generations through their online postings.  Preservation issues aside, this raises the question of identity.  Is an online persona an accurate reflection of and individual?  For our purposes, lets assume that an online persona is the summation of one’s online content, including relationships to others and their content.

danah boyd‘s 2002 thesis from MIT discusses a model of identity that separates the internal and social identities.  To use the analogy provided by Erving Goffman, an individual presents their internal identity as if they were a performer on a stage.  They are influenced by a desire to be perceived in the best possible way depending upon the audience or environment.  There is a difference between the internal and the external or social identity.  The external one is a projection of the internal.  Yet this is only a portion of one’s online identity.

Online, we can examine the reflections that others make to one’s online postings.  These reflections take the form of comments, links and replies. These play an almost equal part in interpreting identity.  They can tell us if others agree with the projections that an individual makes, we can also make inferences about identity based upon the identities of those with whom they interact.

Gary Marchionini, one of my professors, provided the information science community with a new notion of information, the  proflection of self online.  The term, proflection, combines both the projections of an individual and the reflection that others make upon it.

All of this said, let’s go back to our core question.  Are online personas an accurate reflection of an individual’s identity?  There’s no real cut-and-dry answer, but the online persona is an interesting set of data that shows how an individual wants to be perceived and the reflections made by their social network.

Academics aside, what do you think?  Does your Facebook profile, blog and other profiles present an accurate view of who you are and what you believe?

Photo credit: Internet- Good or Bad? by Mikey Gottawa

How does the Internet see you? It’s an odd question, but some folks from the MIT Media Lab are thinking about just that. The project is Personas, a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit. From the project’s Web site:

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.

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.