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Searching my mailboxes the other day, I found a mail from a very dear old friend of mine who passed away much too early. I bet not many of you have mails from people who have died lingering in your mailboxes. The Internet is not that old, and most of the users haven’t had time to die yet.

So what happens on-line when you die? Not much I guess. You’ll still be recieving spam. You’ll have a lot of accounts with free web services to which no one probably knows the login - frozen accounts (not with Hotmail, though, since they apparently destroy non-active accounts).

But with all the social networks now bearing proof of users’ existence as on-line personalities - what will be your afterlife on-line? Let’s take Linked-In as example. I assume that if no one tells them you’re dead, you’ll be just a frozen account there - an image of your status and network at the moment you passed away. But what if people in your network starts mailing LinkedIn with news of your death? Two options:

1. LinkedIn finds proof you’re dead and pull you out of the site. No traces of you will remain. It would be too bad, don’t you think?
2. LinkedIn decides to honor your epitaph by creating a different font colour for you and put a nice little cross nest to your name. You live forever (on LinkedIn). Woudln’t that be nice?

I decided to ask the people at LinkedIn myself. Mail and possible answer will be posted as comment to this post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 10:27 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.