NYTimes on Facebook death, and why we created 1000Memories (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

NYTimes on Facebook death, and why we created 1000Memories (YC S10)

1000memories.com

Cemeteries have endowment funds to ensure the land where people are buried will remain land where people are buried. Sites like this have nothing of the sort. I don't even see a business model.

Without something to guarantee people's memories will live long in the site, you run the risk of their loved ones being taken from them twice. You didn't even address this point on the first page, instead just start talking about your nifty features.

You really need to think about how your startup is going to avoid death if you are asking people to put their faith in you when they try to preserve memories of their loved ones.

Most newspapers already run services like this one. It's not a new idea. All they're doing is making an internet-wide one. The business model? Sell it to end-users or sell it to newspaper obit sections as a managed service.

I'm not sure I see the risk here. Cemeteries are carefully managed because people care a lot about how their remains are cared for. They don't have anything resembling that level of concern over JPG's.

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to make people care enough about their "digital remains" to want the service, but not enough to worry about the risk. Will the new generation of techno-literate users find the happy medium and make this startup successful?

My father passed away about a year and a half ago, and one of the things I did was create a website for him where people could share their stories and memories of his life. (http://jimwhowell.com/) I made it a day or so after he died, and I had no idea what the response would be... I only knew I had to do something to try to capture my memory of him. We ended up getting well over 100 stories on the site, and having all these memories of him has meant so much to me and my family in dealing with our loss.

I think what you are doing with 1000Memories.com will have a similar effect in touching peoples lives and I hope that you have a lot of success with it. Thanks for creating this.

Thanks very much for your words of encouragement. If you were willing, we'd love to speak to you about your experience with your father's web page. Feel free to email me at brett [dot] huneycutt [at] gmail

May be a good idea to register 100memories.com and redirect, that's an easy typo to make.

Do you have a plan to handle fraudulent submissions? I assume there's nothing to prevent me from posting any memorial I want. Could be a problem if it gets indexed quickly.

Two very creepy typos on the main page:

Everyone holds a slither of someone’s life...

I think you meant "sliver", not "slither".

thanks for spotting this, we fixed it

... but added a new typo :)

Everyone holds a sliver of someone’s life and the letting everyone share those slivers can create a wonderful place to vividly remember someone.

Tip: proof-read a text backwards (word-by-word) to catch things that your brain would normally gloss over.

wow! fixed that one too

A common urge when someone passes is to want to do something to honor them; be that planting a tree, naming a trophy or starting a foundation.

I'm not sure the Internet really makes those things easier. Seriously, planting a tree is easier with the Internet?

I've thought a lot about my own death and what I want from the people who love me is that they weep. I don't want some legacy implanted on the world as if I, one of billions, deserves that. But I do want those around me to care, and to express it. Seriously, if you are one of my loved ones and I'm dead then be human and weep.

I think about this every once in awhile, and as a husband and father of two, I'd rather my family has a huge party and is happy for how lucky I've been and how much fun I've had. I don't want people I like to have to weep.

I see where you are coming from. I just don't want me loves ones constrained by some phony dignity or decorum.

I don't think I could ever sleep well at night, knowing that I built a business based upon on the death of others. In other words, I'll never work as a coffin maker or at a funeral home.

No offense or judgement towards the 1000Memories people, I think it's a good goal. That's just my own choice.

Could you build a business on helping to assuage others' grief?

Thinking about it a bit further, if I was not involved in the funeral proceedings that might help stem the self-loathing, so maybe.

I think essentially I'm just really against the high costs of death proceedings. It should cost less money, not more, and the more services that get tacked on the higher the cost gets.

Exactly. Almost a year ago I was considering the same idea. I talked to many people, some of them thought the idea was good. But then I talked to a friend of mine (she was all supportive, btw) and mentioned that I didn't feel right about the project. I said I felt like maybe we should do something for life, not death. She agreed and said she's glad I said this. So from this moment on I decided I'm not using this idea, knowing, of course, someone else would do it for me.

So, if you don't mind sharing, what is your "life" idea?

oh, nothing particular at the moment. Besides, I think it's okay to ditch something you don't truly like even if you have nothing else.

The difficulty here is not in building software for a memorial page [although I'm sure there is a lot of room for experimentation and improvement], but in detecting that someone has passed away, and then handling all interactions relating to that user with extreme sensitivity.

Legacy Locker, while solving a different problem (how do you transfer your online presence to your inheritors?), has a process to deal with this involving death certificates and trusted verifiers: http://legacylocker.com/features/verifiers

Yeah, but on something like Facebook, people don't necessarily think of (or prioritize, given the other pressing issues in their lives) informing the site that someone has passed away.

Well, a friend of mine died (he was about 20) last week and within few days, somebody set up a memorial facebook group and it seems to work quite well, I don't think that anybody feels any need for anything else. On the other hand, nobody gave this any serious thought, he's still online on IRC, nobody turned off his computer yet, I think… This bother me much more, if I just suddenly died, what would happen with all my online stuff? 1000memories is just a tombstone. I'd rather like to have some kind of dead men switch, a place to put my passwords and keys for survivors. But I guess that we still have some kind of old-fashioned offline services for the last wills :-)

Well, I think you might have a new startup idea: track people that are dead but are still online.

A friend of mine has been doing something similar for a while: http://www.forevermissed.com/

Why not chat with the dead via chatbots that capture their personality, interests, knowledge, etc.?

Wouldn't this be a great way to remember people you care about?

In other words, upload their conscious to the internet? If you can figure out how, I'm game.

No, I don't mean that.

I personally feel anything that's not THEM, or at least them to some arbitrary precision, would simply serve as an always-there in-your-face reminder that the person is gone.

If they were actually living on in the internet- not necessarily perfectly, but enough to get people to buy it- that would help assuage grief, but we have no idea how to do that yet.

There's a TV series (Caprica) based around that...

You're only saying this because it was a Max Headroom episode.

One word: creepy.

The uncanny valley for something like this would be deeper than the Marianas.

Does 1000 memories cost money? What are the features?

I hate when sites make me create a log in when I know nothing about them. It is so irritating.

I'm curious about something: is doing a full reprint of the NYT page like this acceptable use? How's the conversion on that blog entry?

(replace-regexp-in-string "reconnect with" "remember")

I'm always leery of a startup based on a platform like this, because Facebook can easily easily take the ground out from under you.

There's also no early mover advantage or network effect (unlike say, admob), so if facebook chooses to implement this it would be fatal.

Facebook made status updates public but it didn't kill Twitter. I think everyone overestimates Facebook's ability to kill companies.

Twitter has network effect.

Twitter is all about asymmetric 'relationships'. You can follow whomever you want. This makes it fundamentally different from Facebook.

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