New social network is for DEAD PEOPLE Not content with worming their way into every aspect of daily life, a new Indian social network has decided to do the same for the afterlife. Departedlife.com is the output of Anglo-Indian outfit Planet E-com Solutions, which says it is a Microsoft Certified Partner offering software development, search engine optimisation and …
After getting made redundant I temped for an insurance company for a bit. One of our form letters was, "I'm sorry to hear about the death of your beloved horse, here's some money."
Nowadays it would probably be, "Sorry your horsey's dead, can we have it please we could murder a lasagne."
I fancy a marble iPad sleeve though. How many relatives and friends do I have to kill off in order to win one?
New twitter rip off for dead people - Harper its called (harp as in what angels play) - their version of tweets are called 'harps' and its customary to describe someone who harps a lot as "harping on a lot" or to say "what's he harping on about now?". Of course its all 'cloud' based to boot!
Do the current sites have plans for their user's dying? And, as a very un-social-networker myself I don't know, is there a social network etiquette (snetiquette I guess?) for this situation yet?
A friend died around 10 years ago and his Myspace profile stayed up. There was a particular song on there that he'd liked, so I can remember thinking about him a few times, and going back to listen to that song and look at photos. I think his family decided to leave it up, or it may just have been that they didn't know how to get it closed, or didn't think about it.
Now Myspace was a bit less interactive than Facebook, but I can imagine an FB page still sitting there, generating content from all the people that were friends, and of course giving Facebook valuable linking information to create their social graph. So even if they close them on family request, I'm sure they keep the data. I guess family could gain control, as they have access to the main email address, and turn them into 'tribute pages', but I don't know if that's the done thing.
Interestingly, I've just checked, and my mate's Myspace page is still there. With a few people who put up birthday wishes every year, saying they miss him. Although I also notice that Myspace have removed his songs.
I could see a number of religious types using this. The Far Eastern traditions with their veneration of ancestors, The Mormons with their genealogy fetish habit.
I know how the site can try to make money. They can offer a paid-for feature of finding your past lives. correlate your (Facebook) data with the dead accounts, and tell you who you were. $50 per life, would be cheaper than a new-age past-life regressionist.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
