Do online identities go to heaven?

It looks like creating an online identity in the post-web 2.0 era that we’re living in is essential. People go into great lengths to present themselves in the online world, participate in as many social networks they can, flood microblogging services like Twitter and Friendfeed with their thoughts, opinions and emotions, share their photos on photo-sharing sites, upload short video clips of themselves on sites like Seesmic, and the list goes on and on and on.

After great effort, we manage to create a solid social online identity to expose our selves and our lives to the public, updating it with fragments of our personalities and everyday activities. But what happens to our online identity when we die? We are all going to die one day — that’s for sure. Have you ever wondered what is going to happen to your online identity in that case?

All of a sudden, you will stop updating. People may nudge you, poke you, send you direct messages, but they wouldn’t get any replies. E-mails that are reaching your inbox will never receive a reply. Cold silence will come out of your Twitter account and your Facebook friends will wonder what’s keeping you busy. Your blog’s RSS feed won’t show any new activity and all the myriads of social networks you joined during your life will host an account that never updates.

How will your online friends know what happened to you if none of your friends or family members are using those services as well? Will people ever wonder what may have happened to me if all of a sudden I stop posting updates on Twitter? Are they going to search for me in other social networks, or leave a comment on my blog, or e-mail me asking why I’ve stopped participating? No person in my physical environment is using Twitter, so no-one’s going to post news about my death.

Will people care after all? Is there any “friend” or “follower” that is going to care that I’ve ceased to post and to exist? And if they got to find out, how would they react? Would they mourn, sob, laugh, re-tweet the news of my death or just un-follow me since no more updates would ever be coming from my account?

Finally, what is going to happen with the information that I’ve submitted to all these sites and services? Will my Facebook account or my Flickr photos still be there, years after I die? Would my family be able to browse my photos, my social networking timeline, my videos and my e-mails and all the myriads of tiny fragments I’ve submitted to the Internet (e.g. comments on other people’s posts)? Would it make them feel better if the data was still there, or would they merely be unable to delete my accounts (since they don’t know the passwords)?

I can’t help but ponder all these questions. I don’t know what’s best to be done. Entrepreneurs could build on this idea, and create a “social memorial” or “web graveyard” for the lost souls of online identities of departed persons. They could even create a service that monitors all online activity of every person and declare them as “missing” if they don’t update in any online service for some time (i.e. a year), or declare them as “dead” after more time passes. They could even crawl the web for every piece of information regarding that person, gather it and create an entry in their Social Memorial so people will remember them.

They could even give the option for their family and friends to pay in order to promote their loved one’s profile to the top of the list, so they could gain more new “mourners”. There may be a grader for these deceased online identities, measuring the value of each one and creating lists about who was the most social one. Such a service may exists even now, as I’m writing this. If there is, please leave a comment and let me know, and if there’s not, I’m damn sure there’s going to be one in the future. This is the social era, everything can be used (and abused) in the name of profit!

For the ambitious entrepreneurs that may be reading this, here’s one more idea: give people the ability to sign up for such a service while they’re living, so they can link it to all their social networks and other sources of personal information. The service would monitor all these sources and upon a prolonged lack of activity, it would create a memorial for them. There you go, I give you this idea for free — it’s too morbid for me to monetize on.

Update [20 May 2009]: Looks like somebody decided to monetize on the premise. I was damn sure this would happen.