Web Graveyard

Very few peo­ple I know blog about death. It is not a pleas­ant sub­ject, and essen­tially, one reads blogs to be happy. But let’s face it, death is very real. Though cyber­space was once known as the vir­tual world, it is becom­ing increas­ingly real, and the over­lap between online and offline is get­ting increas­ingly complex.

As blog­gers, gamers, sell­ers, artists, online com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pants – we are increas­ingly liv­ing very real online roles. We have our own avatars. Our own book­shelves. Our Face­book per­sonae. Our LinkedIn profiles.

So what hap­pens when we die? Death is sud­den and unex­pected for most peo­ple. What hap­pens to their blog­ger friends? How do their Face­book or Orkut friends know? What about items they have put up on sale on eBay? What if they’re part of an open-source devel­op­ment com­mu­nity and are actively con­tribut­ing to projects?

Don’t take this lightly. Sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance in the vir­tual world can cause a great deal of con­cern and have a wider impact than one may sus­pect. Our social world and legal sys­tems take care of the even­tu­al­i­ties in our offline life, but what about our online life when we really go offline? Who are the legal heirs of the copy­rights to our cre­ative dig­i­tal con­tent that we so metic­u­lously safeguard?

CNET’s Tech­ni­cally Incor­rect blog post inspired this post. It describes two web­site ser­vices that send out emails you’ve com­posed after you die. Death­switch has a free account option with one recip­i­ent and no attach­ments. With a tagline of “Bridg­ing Mor­tal­ity”, it encour­ages you not to take your secrets to the grave. Slight­ly­Mor­bid does not have a free account, but has a “Free Trial”. :-)

Startup Con­cept — WebGraveyard

How about WebGraveyard.com? When fully func­tional and out of beta, Web Grave­yard can offer:

  • My Grave­Space – auto­mat­i­cally imported social net­work­ing pro­files like Face­book and MySpace Cemetery
  • My Mem­oirs – a diary of your blogs on Blogger/Wordpress
  • My Graveiti – com­ments on your blog and by vis­i­tors to your eGrave
  • My YouTomb – the videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube
  • My Gallery – auto­mat­i­cally imports your Picasa web albums, Flickr pho­tos, etc.
  • My GraveRoll – links to eGraves of your friends
  • My Graveatar – auto­mat­i­cally imported Gravatar
  • GrMail – auto­mated email reminders of sig­nif­i­cant events in your life­time like anniversaries

Pre­mium Services

  • Users can import your birth­days and anniver­saries into their Google Cal­en­dar or Outlook
  • High-resolution gallery of Tombstones
  • Tem­plates for great Epitaphs
  • Users can drag and drop flow­ers on your eGrave from an abun­dant gallery of beau­ti­ful arrangements
  • GPod – auto­mat­i­cally import and cre­ate a replica of your iPod
  • Your favorite last.fm playlist plays in the back­ground when vis­it­ing your eGrave

Any tak­ers for fund­ing this startup? Any more ideas how it can be made more ‘user-friendly and productive’?

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Related posts:

  1. Web Grave­yard Update
  2. My Online Social Map Visualization
  3. About blog­ging delays…
  4. Time­less vs Real Time

March 24, 2009 – 9:25 AM | By Mahendra | Posted in Personal, blogging, culture, marketing, society, technology | Tagged , , , | Comments (18)

18 Comments

  • Shefaly wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 12:48 PM

    Mahen­dra:

    What a great idea! :-)

    It is a good thing we die before find­ing out exactly how pop­u­lar or unpop­u­lar we are. Imag­ine if _nobody_ sub­scribes to one’s ‘death­feed’! Or nobody turns up at the funeral/ wake/ 4th day/ 13th day etc… ;-)

    PS: How about adding a func­tion MyWill?

  • Poonam Sharma wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 1:56 PM

    I am all for My mem­oirs, My Graveiti, My YouTomb and GrMail.

    This is a great ser­vice and I sin­cerely hope some­one wud come up with it in my life­time, con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of times my blogs have had near-death expe­ri­ences ensu­ing panic :P

  • Nita wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 5:03 PM

    Amaz­ing, never knew these things are done but frankly makes me feel a lit­tle creepy. Shhhivvvvvvvvvvvvver.

  • Final_Transit wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 6:04 PM

    I like this! I’m glad to know that I’m not weird, I’ve already planned for such even­tu­al­ity! :D For the blog, I even have a post ready as draft, and my friend knows how to pub­lish it. Oh, I like Shefaly’s idea about MyWill! ;-)

  • Shefaly wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 9:19 PM

    Mahen­dra: I posted this on Twit­ter. You raise a super valid point and recently some­one in my col­lege in Cam­bridge died and I sent a note to the col­lege to enable them to inform LinkedIn about it.

  • Prax wrote:
    Mar 25, 2009 at 4:41 PM

    Wow
    good ur back to blog­ging ,
    To think of it how many peo­ple make a will?
    Maybe its because death seems to be a scary topic or that peo­ple really dont sit and pon­der about it long enough.
    this is a rather inter­est­ing topic,and funny this is the first post i read in a long time on ur blog.. that too when i had put ur site in my blog grave­yard (hid­den links) as u has stopped blog­ging a while ago.

  • Shefaly wrote:
    Mar 28, 2009 at 3:12 PM

    Prax:

    I was actu­ally talk­ing about India too. My com­ment does not say any­thing about the UK. :-)

  • Web Graveyard Update « An Unquiet Mind wrote:
    Apr 9, 2009 at 8:54 PM

    […] a com­ment » I had recently mooted the con­cept of WebGraveyard.com, where your pres­ence in the online world will for­ever be preserved, […]

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 6:33 PM

    Ha ha ha!!! I like ‘death­feed’. MyWill is cool!

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 6:34 PM

    Thanks Poonam! I’m sure this is a con­cept with a lot of poten­tial. And regard­ing NDEs of your blog, the same is the case here!

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 6:38 PM

    Just to clar­ify — only the two ser­vices I’ve linked to are ‘done’ — the Web Grave­yard con­cept is mine, and not yet imple­mented. I guess any new web con­cept takes some get­ting used to — as is proved by Twit­ter. Who would’ve thought one would like to share one’s thoughts and activites on a moment-to-moment basis in the online world?

    On a seri­ous note, yes this is creepy. That’s why I didn’t want the post to be purely sombre.

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 24, 2009 at 6:39 PM

    Great! Given that your id is “Final Tran­sit”, that isn’t really a sur­prise! :-)

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 25, 2009 at 6:30 AM

    Thanks She­faly. Inform­ing the col­lege was quite con­sci­en­tious of you. This is a real issue, but one that hasn’t been addressed by any­one yet.

  • Shefaly wrote:
    Mar 25, 2009 at 11:31 AM

    Mahen­dra, in my post which you linked, I men­tion not leav­ing trans­ac­tions open for peo­ple. I think the social arrange­ment right now is for the friends and fam­ily to approach social net­works and inform them of the death. LI for instance needs proof of death and will then sus­pend the account or remove it. In her case, it was a road acci­dent so that was easy but I did not want to do it myself. So I informed the college..

  • Shefaly wrote:
    Mar 26, 2009 at 4:07 AM

    Prax: Only fools and extremely self-obsessed peo­ple do not make a will or buy life insur­ance. Any­one who owns any assets must make a will if only to avoid internecine feud­ing after their death. It is also a way to share one’s wealth exactly as one likes. One could leave all money to one’s loyal maid­ser­vant rather than a rel­a­tive, not a default posi­tion in the eyes of the law.

    In India, empir­i­cally speak­ing, intes­tate deaths are a major cause of famil­ial break­down because daugh­ters’ rights to parental prop­erty are rarely hon­oured by sons and girls are gen­er­ally reluc­tant to drag their sib­lings through the courts. Result? A gen­eral cool­ing off of relationships. :-/

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 28, 2009 at 9:01 PM

    Prax, wel­come back and thank you!

    The MyWill sec­tion in WebGraveyard.com is optional! :-)

  • Prax wrote:
    Mar 28, 2009 at 12:56 AM

    She­faly , i was talk­ing about india , maybe it is dif­fer­ent in uk
    here lots of peo­ple have their finances in dis­saray and many a times on their death the wives have to face night­mare sit­u­a­tions ..i have helped at least half a dozen of peo­ple sort out their finances.
    worse only a few peo­ple make a will say less than 50% when it is really easy to make one

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 28, 2009 at 9:03 PM

    She­faly, need­less to say, you are of course right. Its a pity that a major­ity of Indi­ans are either fools or self-obsessed or both!