How To Twitter After You Croak

Although the unofficial LASFS motto “Death will not release you – even if you die” is spiritual, not technological, in nature — now, as CNN reports, companies have transformed that threatened doom into a service for social media users.

Consider _LivesOn, a new project with a catchy tag line “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.”

_LivesOn collects data on subscribers’ Twitter habits and content preferences while they are still alive —

The tool will collect data and start populating a shadow Twitter account with a daily tweet that the algorithm determines match the person’s habits and interests. They can help train it with feedback and by favoriting tweets.

“It’s meant to be like a twin,” said Dave Bedwood, a partner at Lean Mean Fighting Machine.

In the short term, Bedwood and his team said it will serve as a nice content-recommendation engine. But eventually, in the more distant future, the goal is to have Twitter accounts that can carry on tweeting in the style and voice of the original account.

I vote no. I’m already bothered when Facebook prompts me to wish happy birthday to deceased friends. Think how disturbing it will be when they start tweeting answers.

DeadSocial’s more straightforward service allows people to say their final goodbyes by scheduling public Facebook posts, tweets or LinkedIn posts to go out after they’ve died.

However, because these messages can, in theory, be scheduled 400 years out DeadSocial gives everyone the chance to be Hari Seldon by recording a series of “I told you so” messages that can be scheduled centuries in advance. 

That is, unless The Mule comes along and shuts off Facebook

3 thoughts on “How To Twitter After You Croak

  1. You know, I just read an excellent sf book about this sort of thing, although it was for e-mail and video chat in the book. It did anticipate that it would bother people, not least the simulated personalities themselves. I hadn’t expected reality to catch up with it quite this fast.

    (The book is Goodbye For Now, which incidentally is an excellent book– it’s on my Hugo ballot this year…)

  2. The late Robert Anton Wilson wrote of receiving delayed e-mails from Timothy Leary after Leary’s death in 1994. Dr. Leary had arranged such for several of his friends, as a way of softening their grief and to cheer them up from the afterlife, so to speak. “I’m still dead, and everything’s fine!”, and similar.

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