Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time | Hacker News Reader

Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time

good.is

393 pointsdanso68 comments

When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called a "word processor"

When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.

If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one), and spread all over the place. After all, they're my thoughts. Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of data to start with.

I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.

> It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.

All I could think after finishing the article was, "I sure hope she has those messages backed up somehow." Too many horror stories of Google locking up someone's account with no hope of getting it back. (And yes, that could happen with any service provider, she just happened to mention that she's using Gmail).

Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them?

I'm not so sure... there's a lot of things I've written that, looking back a year or two later, I wish I hadn't, yet alone other people reading them too.

And I'm not talking about the generic big examples that people talk about like "that picture of you on facebook throwing up" or anything, just small things, whether it's an MSN conversation where I over-reacted and acted like a complete dick, flirting with someone on MSN in what is later obviously a really embarassing way, or that time I told my friend that my mum/child/brother was boring/annoying/whatever me.

And of course secrets, whether they're ones I want to keep from certain people, or something private that I don't want anyone knowing, but for some reason wrote about in a not-for-public-eyes personal diary sort of way.

I don't know how much there is that I don't want other people seeing, but I know I've seen old stuff I've written/said/done/made that I cringe at now, and I'm sure there's plenty more that I just haven't noticed.

I've thought that. But when I look at those things 5 years later, I realize that it all wasn't such a big deal, and I kind of cherish the ability to see how I thought back then (sometimes I'm more ashamed at how little has changed in 5 years as far as my thought-process and writing style goes).

I'm not so sure... there's a lot of things I've written that, looking back a year or two later, I wish I hadn't, yet alone other people reading them too.

And yet there's also value in seeing the change in someone's thoughts over time. We're not born perfect, but we can try to get better.

I've often done similar cleaning of chat logs and emails from times when I thought I had acted stupidly or naively. But that's just us trying to live up to the idealistic visions that we have of ourselves. Having a record of who you actually were, not who you wished you were, could be refreshing.

Actually one of the guys I go to school with is looking to do that. He's creating a site that aggregates all of your social networks among other things and stores them creating a sort of digital timeline. I'm not real sure on the details as he's still developing it, but the way he described it to me is that social networks focus on the now while his site is meant to preserve the past.

I'm working on the same thing! Where are you guys located?

Iowa. How about yourself?

This is a concept that interests me... where are you in Iowa? I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This is a concept that I've (also) thought a lot about and started hacking on, but right now it looks like http://lockerproject.org/ has a head start.

He knows about Friendfeed, right?

The name for this concept is "lifestream". Lots of projects have attempted it, but nothing has really taken off yet AFAIK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestreaming

http://memolane.com/site/ seems to have done a great job and will possibly only get better.

We are trying to bring together the past and the present (realtime) memories together with http://momment.com

Other great example is http://1000memories.com but this is more of analog memories to digital artifacts as far as I see.

Sincerely, I'd prefer all my digital remains to be cremated.

Same here; I do like to keep an archive for myself, but it's safely stored in a truecrypt volume and I don't think I'll ever share that password.

Your grandchildren will be able to crack that in seconds. :-)

Haha.. a nice thought. Moore's law as time capsule.

The main problem I have with this lifestream idea is with how all the data is in one central location online. Because it is connected to the internet, there is always the possibility that it could be attacked.

It would be a relatively enticing target. If the lifestreams of thousands, not to mention millions, of people were mined, the information found in there would be priceless.

Of course, if it is a piece of software you can run yourself, and you can save your whole lifestream on your own storage devices, I think it is a wonderful idea.

I think this could work. Create an offline repository of logins, and agree to only access them after a hundred years (or proven notice of death).

It would be opt-in of course. Maybe ran by Archive.org? Or as a for profit venture, promising to pass your info on to your family after you die.

Of course, ideally, they would worth in union with service providers. So they would agree to keep your data safe that long, and so that it could be deleted after your death, so no one can pose as you.

Maybe it should be a site like LastPass or PassPack that regularly logs in for you and backs up your data for eventual dissemination post-death? Providing the password service in the meantime?

google does this. They know everything about you. they know you better than you know yourself. and they have never fading memory with infinate storage

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who keeps all that stuff. A few months ago I went back through some old chat logs to find the first time that I chatted with my best friend, and it was a lot of fun to relive that part of my life.

I think people don't realize that the volume of digital artifacts we're creating is going to be staggering when we look back at them a century from now. That's one of the reasons I like to check in places. I imagine what it would have been like if my grandfather had traveled the world with Foursquare in the 1930s -- maybe I'd be able to visit the pubs where he drank in Copenhagen, or the port he arrived at when he met my grandmother in Glasgow.

My life might not be that exciting, but I'm definitely leaving a trail behind. My grandchildren will wonder why I checked in so much at the Palo Alto Creamery. :)

It's strange (interesting?) how an online presence preserves a person beyond death. When someone passes on, their Facebook wall becomes both a snapshot of what they were last doing and an impromptu digital memorial as people leave their condolences. Somber, but thought-provoking.

The trouble with saving all your chats is the sheer volume! I used to keep all my text messages, and log all my IM conversations. Until I realized I had 2,000 text messages on my phone, mostly worthless out of context, and megabytes and megabytes of IM chats. Unless you triage your conversations regularly, logging everything just results in a gigantic mess you will never revisit due to the stunning volume of your archives.

What about search?

Especially with search engines becoming better and better.

The thing is, while it is a lot of data in the grand scheme of things it is a fairly trivial amount of data. Terrabye hard drives can be had for less than $100 today.

Of course, I don't mean to say it is a difficult amount of data to store.

I think people underestimate the value of this material being stored in a searchable, historical database. Whether it's Gmail, Facebook or some other service, it's subsequently one of the best and scariest aspects of all these services. It can lead to horror stories, but it can also lead to automated memories and materials such as the above.

What an interesting world we live in.

It's fun to think that while foursquare may seem fairly trivial today, 100 years from now, it's historical record.

This is where I see value in color.com (seeing photos of the past at your current location), but it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem.

I feel badly for the author, not just for her loss. It seems a little cruel to be denied the therapeutic fading of memories over time (just as a natural part of the grieving process and recovery). I hope that we develop some cultural norms as dying and leaving behind a digital presence becomes more common.

I was just thinking that. Her experience is (so far) uncommon, but I think many people have had the experience of long electronic trails from former relationships. I keep them, mostly because I never feel the need to ever pull them up again, nevermind take the time to delete them. My roommate deleted all of hers, though, and at the time I thought that was drastic.

I don't know about that. People keep home movies, pictures, etc. Likely over-time she may check them less and less, probably does so already. Maybe only checking on certain days or holidays. I don't think it's that strange, plenty of people keep reminders of loved one's lost without crippling themselves.

It's just that she mentioned that his contact was just below her best friend. From there it's just one click to have access to years of correspondence. And it's particularly difficult to consider deleting contacts or calendar reminders for love ones who have passed, so this is presented to her on a regular basis (not just when she wants to remember him, like one would do with home movies/photographs/etc).

I don't think it's crippling, it just makes the process of moving on a little longer and more difficult.

Yes, the thing to do would be to archive it, and then delete the contact. Similar to taking the love letters out of the desk drawer and moving them up to a trunk in the attic.

Also has the added benefit of not being dependent on gmail retaining the logs. This needs to be made easier and encouraged.

The grieving process is very important and when it is subverted by the continued opening of woulds, it can cause problems. There is a great This American Life about this, where a 16 year olds mother dies but left her notes to be given to her on specific days (typically birthdays). The results are very interesting:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/401/p...

Holy crap. Normally stories like this don't affect me very much. I'm on my lunch break, on the verge of sobbing. Is somebody cutting onions?

Part of me wants to delete all of my chat logs so that I can never relive this stuff if something were to happen to my SO. But then I'd lose all of that, and the thought of losing those memories is terrifying.

Same reaction here.

Actually made me remove a filter I had to trash all chats. Saving, resources allowing, from here on out.

Man, I had to stop reading, and catch up later. What a Sad Story, and it made me think a lot about my digital presence and my relationship. Actually, I'm going to read my first chat with my gf.

I don't delete any data, and in fact on my Drobo and RAID on our home server I have files going back to Jr. High.

I often look at how my parents remember things, like my dad remembering his now deceased parents and realize that memory for me is going to be fundamentally different.

For one: they have a memory dictated by the physical effects of chronology. Their photographs and videos age. Mine age only when subject to progress of technology and arbitrary concepts that are based on representation (i.e., datestamps).

My memories live outside of time now. Ten years ago is morphologically no different than yesterday. The only fundamental fissure with chronology is file formats, but even that isn't insurmountable.

My wife and I first emailing, our first date, my child's birth, our wedding: all there in a Spotlight index and on redundant drives.

The memories of my great grandpa, my wife's grandmother: all there.

The thing is: does this stop? I've taken 2900 photos of my son so far (in two years). When do we live so fully outside of time that we lose our concept of it passing? We can live without letting go with so little consequence, just the addition of drives, that its silly not to try.

In ten years, I'll have accumulated exponentially more data than in the ten years, or twenty years prior. I don't yet know if that's a good thing.

A very sad story; and I'm sure she's not a unique case in her behaviors around her husband's death. I cannot imagine how I would cope with losing my wife (and frankly, I don't want to)--but I suspect I might spend time looking at old chats and emails as well.

While I know it's not the focus of the article, I hope the article also serves as a reminder to HN readers like myself who "carry the ginger gene" to pay attention to your skin, and get screened by a dermatologist regularly. Melanoma, like most forms of cancer, is easiest to beat when caught early.

My girlfriend and I weren't living in the same city when met, so we started our relationship over gchat and text message. We're both pretty glued to our iPhones, so large parts of our relationship are chronicled in digital form. We sometimes find ourselves resolving the "honey I definitely said that" tiffs of daily life with a quick search of our chat logs.

The internet is often accused of putting barriers between couples, but this article gives a sweet example of how it can contribute to relationships as well.

I met my Girlfriend at the library of our school. We didn't exchange names or anything really when we first me, but the printer kiosks in the library require you to authenticate with your school IDs. Our school email addresses are our <ID>@<schoolname>.edu

When I was talking to her the first time, I noticed her ID (or something close, I had to try a few variations actually) and I emailed her later that night. She didn't think I was being creepy, although I probably was.

We've been dating a long time now, but sometimes we'll go back and look at our first real conversation which happened to be online via email. It's kind of special to me and her to have a record of this meeting.

I love having this ability to re-read old conversations.

That's a great story.

That's really touching.

In a happier version of this, I was at a wedding rehearsal dinner where the bridesmaids got up and read a similar narrative, stitched together from their own chat histories with the bride.

It went from "I met someone last night! :)" to "I'm excited about our date" to "I think things are getting serious" to "Oooh I'm so pissed at him right now" to "We got engaged!"

I think about things like this sometimes when I hear people say they want to change the world. What they mean is that they want to change the world in a way that they can imagine, but the law of unintended consequences won't let you off that easy.

Was some Google engineer thinking in 2005, "implementing chat logging in GMail is going to change the world!" I doubt it, but for these people it is a changed world. What looks from one angle like appending lines to a table somewhere, from another looks like your own personal biographer taking snapshots frozen in time.

I have a discussion board that I've run for over ten years. While I'm not as invested in running it anymore, the reason I keep it online and active and maintained is because it contains within it the narrative histories of a group of people. These histories have ended up in marriages, babies, deaths and friendships.

I think people don't often consider text on screen to be as meaningful as it is.

We are building a service specifically to track this sort of thing. It's an open source project here: https://github.com/lockerproject/locker

If you're interested in ways to track and parse through all the types of data that you're producing, take a look! We're probably about a month away from a hosted offering, but you can pull down the source and run it yourself today.

I think Locker is an extremely interesting project. As I understand it, it's a big step in the direction of decentralization: a practical way to keep the data that's important to you under your own control, not under the control of some company that's not accountable to you, one of the themes I touched on in "Why I do not want to work at Google".

So I want to encourage everyone else to look at this.

That was incredibly beautiful and arresting. Thank you for sharing.

gchat's chat is one of the most useful feature ever. It is absolutely unforgiveable why such hyped up and high-usage clients like skype do not let you record chat conversations and make them searchable online.

So sad. When are we curing cancer again? :(

"We"? I'm not working on it. Are you?

I presume he meant "we", as in a broader sense of a collective society.

Regardless, you don't have to be directly working on it to help the cause. There are thousands of ways to donate money toward cancer research. Thus, if cancer were to be cured I think some credit would go to the larger body of people who have supported the research throughout the years. So, yes, "we" would be curing cancer.

Nice reply, sapiens.

Jorge Cham, the author of PhD Comics, did a nice writeup summarizing what he learned from visiting the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: that "cancer" isn't just one disease, and so there will never be "a cure"- it just doesn't work that way.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162

I hope she's keeping backups somewhere outside the cloud.

I don't see the point in hoarding this sort of data. I mean, I can see the sentimental value, but I think the disadvantages of having to manage that data and the risk of it being leaked outweigh it.

I delete my email after I've dealt with it, and I regularly delete my IM chat logs.

Wondering is there any service that takes care of your personal domain name after you have gone?

Some of you might enjoy this TED talk abut last status update: http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status...

Jesus that was sad.

Got something in my eye reading that...

My health isn't stellar right now. Makes me think about the conversations I'm having now with my woman. Off I go to say something sweet...

Sentimental story, but at some point keeping memories of the past can be too painful. Better to try and forget and move on with life. Keeping in touch with the past helps for a short period, and can be therapeutic, but after awhile, it can be distracting and keep you from moving on.

Cancer is terrible. this is a beautifully emotional heart breaking story. something i would expect on the front page of reddit. But what the heck does it do on my Hacker News with 350 upvotes?? Get off my lawn!

We owe it to the dead to keep on living. For people like this, I say: "move on and stop living in the past". Life goes on and must go on.

It's part of the grieving process, a process that takes a long, long time. Let people grieve as they will.

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