Dying in a Web 2.0 World
An interesting thought came to me while I was taking a shower earlier (as do most of my great thoughts and ideas).
What happens to your web 2.0 services when you die?
I’m particularly curious with services such as Flickr that require an paid annual memebership. When I die, and my membership expires, my account is reverted to a ‘free’ status and you can only view 200 of my images.
That sucks ass.
I’m getting more and more into photography, and a firm believer of Thomas Hawk’s The best photographs in the world have yet to be taken. But what happens if I happen to take some of those pictures, but no one gets to see them cause you’re dead?
Granted you could have family members or friends renew your account for you, but they gotta die sometime too.
I remember sometime ago, MetaFilter first learned about a user that had passed on. I don’t have a link handy, but whatever contributions this person made, will be preserved because their dues were paid ($5, one time fee).
Which is pretty much what I’m getting at here. When you die, what helps keep your services going? Email accounts get deleted/disabled after a period of inactivity, Flickr will not show more than 200 photos, etc.
This might be the right time for some kind of insurance company to preserve your presence online? A service that you pay a certain amount of money to every month or whatever, and helps keep your work available to the masses for years after you’re demise? It could help pay for your web hosting bills, your typepad account, your flickr account, and maybe even start closing up accounts that you no longer use, like e-mail, or twitter even.
I have weird thoughts when I shower.
