Death doesn't stop social networking

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

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