Maria uploaded a couple of nice photos, typed in basic information about herself, added some of her friends ... and updated her status to ‘aries’ just before going out on that fateful Saturday evening. That was to be the last thing she’d do in terms of her online networking life. A few hours later, the car Maria was riding in went off the road and ran into a pole with the passenger, Maria, taking most of the impact. Her heart stopped beating for at least 5 minutes and by the time the paramedics arrived she was already coma from which she would never emerge.
The next day, Maria’s friends flooded her Hi5 profile asking whether it was their friend people were talking about. Maria wasn’t there to reply. It was at that moment that the profile Maria created in order to connect with her friends, turned into a live, interactive memorial allowing people to share photos and memories of their late friend.
Fact: online social networking profiles are surviving their creators. From celebrities like Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, Jade Goody to people like Cody Bales, Randen Harvey, Ryan Felt - who? Well, I got the last three names from a specific kind of database called Mydeathspace. As the name suggests, the website specialises in MySpace profiles of dead people. Submitting a dead person's name is quite easy – just fill in a simple formula on the website, the administrators supposedly run a few checks and the Myspace profile is posted in the database for all to see and scrutinize .
One of the most morose profiles I’ve come across is that of Jonathan, a 21 year old man from Texas. Before killing himself, Jonathan wrote a suicide note on his Myspace blog in order to let people know what his intentions were. He changed his status message to ‘I’m gone... sorry’ and killed himself, with friends frantically calling police and paramedics, who did not get to Jonathan on time. Other profiles found in this directory are those of Frank, who killed his girlfriend and then himself, Jacob who fell into a canyon, Samuel who was stabbed in a chest, and many others - 12,400 in all, to be precise
This website had become so popular that at one point it was crashing repetitively due to the sudden inflow of internet traffic generated by an article published on the CNN website. For 15 days in July 2007, the site had to close down, memory recovered, re-uploaded and republished due to damage to the servers caused by the sudden barrage of ‘hits’. When the site went back online, in August 2007, extensive criticism and formal complaints against the website were filed. Predictably, it all got out of hand when numerous ‘vandals’ used the site in order to mock the dead and their relatives. When the site's success declined, however, it was not due to anyone's complaints but because to the rising popularity of Facebook over Myspace - the former flaunting clearer and stricter security options making a 'Facebook-of-the-dead' obsolete.
This, however, was not enough to solve problems caused by this issue of dead users. A popular mechanism which works automatically within Facebook, and cannot be deactivated, is the one which actively looks for potential friends you might have missed. It has been increasingly reported that some suggested friends were actually dead. Only a few weeks ago did Facebook decide to address the problem. Facebook's web designers came up with a way of limiting the functionality of the profile of those users who had passed away. Although relatives can opt to have the profile permanently deleted on presentation of a death certificate, they may instead choose to leave a limited profile active, in which only the Wall - where people can post messages - is active. That way, while people can still post messages on their departed friends' wall, no future log-in attempts or new friend additions are allowed.
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