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Darrin Underwood's father died from cancer 25 years ago, but he still thinks about him each day. And while Facebook didn't exist when his father was alive, his memory now lives on there.

Underwood created a memorial page on Facebook for his father through Evertalk, a new Facebook app. It's one of the burgeoning services that have launched in recent years to cater to the digital afterlife, that is, all that happens online after a person passes away.

The Internet, after all, continues ticking. More than 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily. Some 340 million tweets are sent each day. But what happens to the photos and tweets after the person who created them dies?

Evertalk - as well as 1000memories and about 30 to 40 other startups - are trying to respond to that thorny question. Many offer a way to remember and honor the person online, so friends and family can write messages and share photographs in a digital memorial. Others look after a person's digital assets, such as their e-mail and social media accounts and passwords. And some online services enable people to send pre-written messages to their friends and family years after their deaths.

"We've had this huge shift happen. This physical world has become a very digital world. Elements of our lives are now digital," said John Romano, a researcher and co-author of the book "Your Digital Afterlife" and the blog "The Digital Beyond."

Take Facebook again. With more than 900 million users on the social network, it has become the destination to share, rant and rave. But at some point, a person's Facebook timeline ends. San Francisco's Evertalk wants to be there to pick up where it left off.

"We are using Facebook as a story of our digital life, but what happens after you die?" said Evertalk founder Russ Hearl. Evertalk "picks up where the Facebook timeline ends."

Hearl said he was inspired to start Evertalk a few months ago after a friend passed away and he only heard about it a few weeks later on Facebook.

Online memorial sites have been around for years, but Evertalk takes the trend to Facebook. It notifies friends and family on the network about the person's death and allows them to upload and share photos, write messages, make donations and send announcements about the memorial, without having to go to another website and create a new user name and password.

Underwood, who works in technology sales in San Jose, created the page for his father a few weeks ago and plans to share it with some of his friends and family on Facebook. So far, he's uploaded a few photos and written a biography about his father. In the future, he'd like to share it with his children.

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Death doesn't stop social networking

The Irish Times - Saturday, July 14, 2012

INE McMAHON

Social network sites calls for boycottSocial networking sites were alive with backlash following the not guilty verdict in the Michaela McAreavy trial.

Social network sites calls for boycott

Social networking sites were alive with backlash following the not guilty verdict in the Michaela McAreavy trial.

A Facebook group called Boycott Mauritius was set up on Thursday and has almost 5,000 members.

The group calls on members to show your disgust at the actions of the island of Mauritus and to boycott the island.

The comments included:Shame on the Mauritius Supreme Court. Shame on the Defense counsel. Avoid this country at all costs. There is no justice in this country.

Another contributor said: People may feel angry, emotional and dismayed but we could boycott every country in the world for its failings in the judicial/legal system. Certainly the pressure should be put on the Mauritius government to sort its own procedures out.

Several group members urged people to boycott the holiday island and slammed the decision of the Mauritius judicial system, while others paid wishes to the McAreavy and Harte families.

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Social network sites calls for boycott

Endless ink, digital and otherwise, has been spent debating whether Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the rapidly-multiplying social media ilk are the best or worst thing ever to happen to humankind. Much less has been spent on what it means for markets.

But a recent story about car-pooling apps highlights the fact that modern technology, including social media, has a role to play in making markets more efficient. And since efficient markets are generally a good thing, this counts as a big checkmark in the "plus" column of our calculations concerning the net benefit of social media.

Another big enemy of efficient markets is monopoly power, essentially a situation in which some market actor enjoys a relative lack of competition and hence has the ability to throw its weight around. Social media promises improvements here, too. Sites like Groupon allow individuals to aggregate in ways that give them substantial bargaining power.

The general lesson here is that markets thrive on information. Indeed, economists' formal models for efficient markets assume that all participants have full knowledge-that is, they assume that lack of information will never be an issue. Social networks are providing increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for aggregating, sharing, and filtering information, including important information about what consumers want, about what companies have to offer, and so on. So while a lot of attention has been paid to the sense in which social media are "bringing us together," the real payoff may lie in the way social media render markets more efficient.

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Social networking's hidden ethical value

A social networking company is not a technology company like Intel is a technology company; its users are its product.

It is easy to forget how high-flying Digg once was. Digg was supposed to be the future of all media, not just social media. People were going to rule the Internet; people were going to curate the web. Down with gatekeepers! But, as many Digg users quickly discovered, new gangs of gatekeepers kept a tight grip on the site's story flow. These guys played the Digg system, often with a mix of social and monetary motives, and Digg never figured out how to incorporate their power users into their community without giving them all the power.

Here was the huge problem with the Digg system. People submitted stories that were nominally voted up or down. But those stories didn't get linearly get more traffic as the upvotes flew. No, you only got a bunch of traffic if the algorithm selected the story and sent it to the front page. This meant that trying to "pop" stories on Digg was like playing NBA Jam with hotspots turned on. The same amount of effort sometimes yielded 12 points and sometimes 2 points and most often 0 points.

The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. And so, some people began to work at it like a job, and then it became their jobs. While some really thought of themselves as an important part of the journalistic enterprise, many others contracted out their services to entities of all kinds. Stripped of any institutional sense of editorial ethics, many Digg power users ended up promoting all kinds of crap along with good stories from legitimate writers and sites.

Meanwhile, everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."

In short, the community broke. And the community, remember, is also the content machine. Without that, Digg was revealed to be just a bunch of computers waiting for people to add value to the thin offering of a social network. The site still gets a substantial amount of traffic, but that Myspace/Friendster smell of death hangs in the pixels.

There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000. All the rest of the value derives from the people that use it. Though scaling is tough, any developer in the world can build some profiles and let people connect up. It's an act of genius -- or an act of God, by which I mean luck -- to design a site constitution that makes people want to build their online lives at your URL (or in your app). Social networking companies are not technology companies as much as they are community companies.

To be honest, I don't know why anyone tries to start these things. No one has much of a competitive advantage, the space is crowded, you can't compete on price, and no one wants to join a Reddit for hermit crabs. Then I remember how social networks function: users produce the product and they *are* the product. Now that's some kind of good hustle.

More From The Atlantic

Excerpt from:
The Big Digg Lesson: A Social Network Is Worth Precisely as Much as Its Community

A supposed link between social networking websites and depression has been debunked by a US study.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin found no significant link between the amount of time spent on social networking sites and the probability of depression.

The study by the university's School of Medicine and Public Health comes after a report last year by the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that exposure to Facebook could lead to depression.

University of Wisconsin researchers surveyed 190 university students aged 18 to 23 about their internet use over seven days.

The students were sent 43 text messages during the period asking if they were currently online, how long they had been online and what they were doing on the internet.

Participants spent more than half their total time online on Facebook.

But when the researchers evaluated the data including the depression screening results, no significant links with social media use and depression was found.

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Social media, depression link debunked