What happens to your Facebook profile when you die?  In the ever increasing world of social media, this question is more likely to be asked. Interestingly enough, since about May of 2007 Facebook has had a policy of memorializing the pages of members who have died, hiding some features like the status updates, and locking it down to prevent any hacking attempts. Confirmed friends and family members can still post to the memorialized wall and view the page, which for some people is a great way to maintain a connection.

This policy came about because back in 2007 Facebook had intended to remove the profiles of some students at Virginia Tech who had been killed. Because of online protests and a letter-writing campaign by friends and other Facebook members who heard that the pages were to be removed, the company instead decided to memorialize them. Read More »

“This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.”  from futureoftheinternet.org

I haven’t read the book yet, just saw someone else tweet about it so checked it out – but I ordered me a copy at Amazon as it sounds like a very fascinating book. It’s the kind of thing I’ve thought about myself off and on the last few years, but never really took the time to pull into any kind of cohesiveness. Relying on the Web, as I do, for a living, the subject is important to me. But it’s important to you too, because there’s very few people who are not directly affected by the Internet in one way or another. Read More »