Mediaboss Marketing

As time goes on, it becomes clear that this whole internet thing isn't just a passing fad. Yet somehow, as popular as social networking has become around the world, no one has really managed to solve the problem of what happens to a person's web presence when they die. Facebook deletes or memorializes the accounts of dead users (meaning that you can still post on their wall, but the account can't be updated or even logged in to) but that doesn't please everyone and there are a lot of questions about what should be done, especially when relatives want to update a dead person's page as a tribute.

The India-based startup Creative Nature's DepartedLife project hopes to solve this problem with what it calls "the world's first social networking site for departed souls." This isn't actually true; there are a number of other sites like this including one created by Monster.com's founder. But DepartedLife is definitely the first Asian social network for the dead that we have come across.

It's not difficult to understand the impetus behind creating such a site, and founder Rahul Suri told us that the site was inspired by the death of his mother:

It's a noble goal and there's an increasing demand for it, as our social networking profiles say a great deal about who we are, and that's all information our family and friends may be interested in after we're gone.

Unfortunately, in its present beta iteration, DepartedLife doesn't do much to separate itself from the pack. The site's design is certainly functional but there's nothing special about it, and you still have to create the profiles of loved-ones manually rather than directly importing information from a Facebook account (for example). That's the kind of feature that would really set the site apart from the pack, but sadly, it's not there yet.

The site does allow users themselves to log in via Facebook, but I'm not sure I would recommend it, as the app asks for permission to do almost everything, including log in as any Pages accounts you might have connected to your own. Obviously, you can opt-out of this, but why would it ask for that kind of permission in the first place? It could just be a bug, of course, but I'd be a bit wary of the Facebook login until it's fixed.

So in the end, we're featuring DepartedLife here not so much for what it is as for what it could be. A site that could pull information from Facebook and other social networking sites to automate the memorialization process but then still allow family members and friends to post updates could be very popular. When most startups are thinking about the targets for their services, they're thinking mostly about people who are alive, but there is definitely space in Asia for services that allow users to memorialize their loved ones. Whether DepartedLife becomes one of those will depend on whether the startup is willing to rethink a lot about the way the site works now. (Note: normally we'd include a screenshot of the site in a review like this, but it seemed a bit disrespectful to uses photos of the dead in a startup review, so we've just pulled an image from DepartedLife's Facebook page instead).

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Indian Startup DepartedLife is a Social Network for Dead People

News: Wiz Khalifa Defends Ditching Studio & Social Networking: "I'm Not Gonna Lie"

Wednesday, Feb 27, 2013 9:39AM

Written by Cyrus Langhorne

Pittsburgh rapper Wiz Khalifa has defended putting music-making and social networking on the shelf in light of fiance Amber Rose bringing their newborn son into the world last week.

Khalifa let his 9.5 million Twitter followers know fatherhood currently holds more weight than the title of hip-hop artist.

A few days ago, G-Unit's 50 Cent congratulated Wiz for becoming a father.

The couple also received a few other notable shout-outs courtesy of artists like Rihanna and Snoop Dogg.

Rose and Wiz welcomed their baby boy into the world last Thursday (February 21).

Check out a recent Wiz Khalifa interview:

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Wiz Khalifa Defends Ditching Studio & Social Networking: "I'm Not Gonna Lie"

What kills a social network? A group of internet archeologists have picked over the digital bones of Friendster the pioneering social networking site that drowned in Facebooks wake and we now have a clearer picture of its epic collapse.

Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it.

It ended up being a kind of controlled demolition, with weakly connected chains of friends quickly disintegrating, says David Garcia, a professor with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing Friendsters demise.

Just before Friendster relaunched itself as a gaming site in 2011, the Internet Archive crawled the dead network, grabbing a snapshot. Garcia and his fellow researchers used that snapshot of that controlled demolition as the basis for their research, which they describe as both a work of internet archeology and an autopsy.

What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network werent particularly strong. Many of the users werent connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasnt worth it.

First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling, Garcia told us during an online chat.

You can see the hollowing out of Friendster in this diagram:

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have resilience and social influence, Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.

If theres a lesson to be learned from the data, its that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need to have strong connections too. So Facebook should be looking at the types of connections it users have and encourage them to connect to other strongly connected users, Garcia says.

In other words, strong networks are made up of strongly-linked people, not of stragglers.

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The Friendster Autopsy: How a Social Network Dies

BEIJING, Feb.26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --Renren Inc. (RENN), the leading real name social networking internet platform in China, today announced that it will report its unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2012 on Monday, March 11, 2013, before U.S. market hours.

The earnings conference call with simultaneous webcast will take place at 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday, March 11, 2013 (Beijing/Hong Kong Time: 7:00 p.m., Monday, March 11, 2013). Renren's management will be on the call to discuss the quarterly results and answer questions.

To participate in the conference call, please RSVP by email at ir@renren-inc.com.

Interested parties may participate in the conference call by dialing the numbers below and entering passcode Renren, 10-15 minutes prior to the initiation of the call.

Dial-in Information:

US: +1 718-354-1231 Hong Kong: +852-2475-0994 China: +86 800-819-0121 International: + 65-6723-9381

Passcode: Renren

A replay of the call will be available for one week and dial-in information is as follows:

International: + 61 2-8199-0299 Passcode: 14671441

This call will be webcast live and the replay will be available on Renren's corporate web site at http://ir.renren-inc.com for 12 months.

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Renren Inc. to Release Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Results on March 11, 2013

CHICAGO, Feb. 25, 2013 Judges may participate in electronic social networking, but as with all social relationships and contacts, they must comply with relevant judicial ethics provisions, according to a new ethics opinion from the American Bar Association.

Formal Opinion 462, Judges Use of Electronic Social Networking Media, also calls on jurists to avoid conduct that would undermine their independence, integrity or impartiality, or create an appearance of impropriety.

The opinion, issued by the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, discusses factors for judges to consider when participating in social media, such as sharing comments and photos; being friended or otherwise associated with potential or current parties, counsel, witnesses, jurors or other litigation participants; and campaigning for office or supporting a political candidate. The ethics opinion also discusses considerations for possible disclosure of such activities to parties in a case and disqualification from hearing a case if necessary.

The opinion cites various state ethics opinions on judges use of social media and relevant portions of the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct, which serves as the basis for state judicial ethics cannons.

The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility periodically issues ethics opinions to guide lawyers, courts and the public in interpreting and applying ABA model ethics rules to specific issues of legal practice, client-lawyer relationships and judicial behavior.

Formal Opinion 462 and other ABA ethics opinions are available at the ABA Center for Professional Responsibilitys website, http://www.americanbar.org/cpr.

With nearly 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is one of the largest voluntary professional membership organizations in the world.As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.

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Judges Who Use Social Networking Should Heed Conduct Code, ABA Ethics Opinion States