Facebook has just made it easier to stay friends with those who have passed on, allowing family or loved ones to request that a dead user’s account be “memorialized”—frozen except for the Wall, where “friends” can leave comments and share memories. Facebook pushed out the feature after a new “reconnect” tool started suggesting that users get back in contact with deceased friends, among others. Are Facebook accounts for the dead a good idea?
Hooray for virtual immortality: “Sounds like a good idea to me,” says Harry McCracken in Technologizer. I like the idea that when we die, we won’t “disappear altogether from the online world.” Then again, it “may sound creepy,” but I sometimes keep dead friends in my address book, too, as “little reminders of our friendship.”
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