Facebook for the dead

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.”

“Facebook for the Departed”

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Facebook’s late to the wake: “Online memorials are nothing new,” says Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon. Along with MyDeathSpace and the “Second Life–type Virtual Heaven,” there are “countless” sites memorializing individual people. Still, given the site’s 300 million users, the Grim Reaper is surely a much more “frequent visitor to Facebook.” So “be careful what profile pic you post or what your friends write on your wall—it might be your last enduring image.”

“Facebook friends to the end”

Facebook now needs a ‘living will’ option: “For the record, Facebook—please delete me when I die,” says Steven Hodson in The Inquisitr. When I’m gone, the only people I want remembering me are those “I have known in real life,” not in a virtual social network. “There is an endpoint to everything in our world and our presence on the web is no different.”

“To whom it may concern: Please delete my Facebook account upon my death”