i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

“When a tiger dies, it leaves its skin behind. When a person dies, he leaves his name behind.” Chinese proverb

As you know, we die someday. We will leave what we had, made and used. Nowadays, we are living on the web as well as physical world. On the web, we not only meet friends and family, also make a new friends. More works are done by and seen on the web. What is not on the web is sometimes regarded as even not existing. Then, what will happen to “my existence on the web” after I died?

1000Memories: A Loved One Has Passed Away. What’s Your Digital Strategy? (Jul 9, 2010, TechCrunch) introduces a service where people can share photos and stories of their deceased friends. It is for the people remained. The people organize and show what they remember, feel about the person. It’s a memorial place.

It’s not for what the person leave on the web, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blog posts. Is it possible? It would be hard to track all of his/her activities on the web. To know or determine a death automatically is also hard. Since identities on the web couldn’t matched with them on the real world easily, although government will know s/he died, service providers couldn’t find the death.

Do we need it? Hm… maybe or maybe not.

See also Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook (Oct 26, 2009, Facebook Blog)