
Facebook 'memorialises' profiles - madmotive
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8327607.stm
======
DanielBMarkham
At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future.

Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The
pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will
outnumber living people on the net.

Sounds strange, but that's the trend.

~~~
jimbokun
It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead
people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting
off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are
"memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for
someone even after they are gone.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Agreed. I think it's going to take a long time to get the tone just right.

But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very
easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and
posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already
doing similar things.

Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we
can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational
power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic
and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Technology has _not_ waited. People need memorial rituals. I realized this the
other week, when we held such a ritual on HN.

I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too
bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize
someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong
ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a
gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.

(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say
something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost
a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more
mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people
that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public
statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is
to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk
calling attention to oneself instead.)

Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be
more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances
on that web, is going to outlive us all.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm the editor of an online magazine (volunteer-based, no ads) that allows
comments. On a few occasions when we've posted reports on deaths, those
reports have attracted comments from people who knew the deceased and wanted
to leave a message somewhere.

It's strange and touching that a site intended to discuss urban issues might
also serve as a _de facto_ online memorial, but there you have it: people will
find their own uses for any reasonably open system.

------
scotth
Why would they remove status updates?

I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's
online history, just to remember.

~~~
a-priori
I think they should allow the next-of-kin to choose what they want
memorialized, what they want kept private (or perhaps family-only) and what
they want destroyed.

I would imagine most families would want to keep the deceased's status
messages, but not all of them (in cases of suicide, for example, as riklomas
pointed out).

~~~
araneae
If I died, I wouldn't want my parents to have access to my Facebook page.

------
tokenadult
I wanted to know beforehand how to delete a Facebook account permanently

<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703>

[http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit...](http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit_facebook_and_delete_your.html)

and shared log-in information with immediate family members, so that we can
decide what stays up and what gets deleted if one of us dies.

Based on other Internet businesses I have dealt with over the years, I think
it is a lot more likely that my Facebook info will be permanently lost than
that I will die while Facebook is still a going business, but I could be
wrong.

------
mechanical_fish
Hm:

 _When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an
obituary or news article._

So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure
out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits
provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for
much longer.

\---

[1] Only _tasteful_ gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is
going to require a very careful touch.

[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and
I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in
theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press.
This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a
newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for
free.

Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't
underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will
be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't
have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something
one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper".
Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of
revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.

~~~
maukdaddy
My first thought is...what's the easiest way to make a fake obituary so that I
can prank my friends and get their profiles marked as memorialized? This is
going to happen, and it's going to happen a lot.

~~~
PStamatiou
gonna be hard for that to work if your friend updates their status message in
the time that you reported them deceased and the days it takes facebook to get
around to looking in to it..

------
inc
Your Friend is now dead.

~~~
axod
Surely it'll be a news item:

"Fred changed his status from Living to Dead!"

------
Edinburger
I am torn on this. For some folks, this will be a wonderful persistent
reminder of the deceased and a place to leave memorial messages. For other
folks, it could become an awkward persistent reminder that just makes it hard
to grieve and move on.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It is _always_ hard to grieve and move on.

And, though I have met quite a few people who have lost friends and family
members, I don't recall anyone whose response to losing a loved one was to
destroy all the mementoes. One is far more likely to cherish them.

------
albemuth
I remember the feeling of stumbling into the profile of someone that had
passed away, IMO it's better if they'd just allow family/friends to shut it
down and have a way to backup the photos/updates.

------
zzleeper
A very good friend of mine just died yesterday, so I kinda understand why it's
a really good idea to do that =/

~~~
robotron
Someone in my community of friends passed away recently and continually shows
up in the new "reconnect with" recommendations. This is timely and appropriate
I think.

------
j_baker
This seems really coincidental considering that Mark Zuckerberg got a question
about what facebook was doing to preserve our data for the next 2,000 years.

His response was "I like thinking in the long-term, but not that long-term".
Anyone else get the impression that this is a compromise?

~~~
byrneseyeview
I think they've been doing this for a long time:
[http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-08-facebook-
vate...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-08-facebook-vatech_N.htm)
. But it's a smart PR move to talk it up after the "next 2000 years" question.
(Certainly better than waiting for a tragedy, like last time.)

