When you die, what happens to your Facebook profile? That's a question that most Facebookers don't really think about, but with 500 million members, the problems of death and ghost accounts are becoming very real for the website:
Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.
The friend had died in April.
“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.
That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.
Jenna Wortham of The New York Times has the story: Link (Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux / NY Times)
http://www.mydeathspace.com/
It's all about celebrity now, apparently. But in the early days, they'd just showcase dead people's profiles.
what??
i have two dead friends who's old pages still haunt me
i feel like most facebookers are already aware of this issue
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=deceased
I did however get annoyed when Facebook kept telling me to say hi to him.
I think the memorialized page idea is nice. With my friends that have passed away, I personally don't want to see them on there at all and hate the way it feels when I have to "unfriend" a dear deceased friend, and I might want to see their page occasionally, but on my own terms when I feel up to it. That would provide a way that they could stop showing up in my facebook stuff on regular days when the reminder that they're gone isn't fun, but I'd still be able to see it if I wanted to. I don't want to be asked to reconnect with them. I don't want to see their name when I'm sending out invitations to a party they won't be attending. Making their profile into a memorial page would be sort of a happy medium between blotting out someone's profile and still treating them like a living person.
FB asking me to reconnect? Notsomuch.
you die and your page still exists but you have no friends?
sounds lame to me
i guess more than anything it's convenient if somebody else knows your password so they can at least change something in your page, that way you're not "driving to a party" until the end of time.