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22/07/2012

Before death: commemorating yourselves and leaving instructions behind

Several websites already offer ways to creating your own commemoration and / or leaving instructions behind, to be filled after your death: 
  • "B Celebrated" - "Create your autobiographical legacy website. Share your story with your words, images and audio. Automatically email your community when you pass away.  Leave a permanent site where your friends and family will celebrate your life."
  • "Parting Wishes" - "Document your funeral wishes and organ donation preferences. Specify your health care wishes in case you are ever unable to communicate. Create a web page about your life which only goes online after you pass away."
  • "After Steps" - "Estate planning, financial planning, funeral planning and legacy planning": from organ donations (or not) to how to best take care of your pets.
  • The iPhone application "Legacy Organiser" - "Major events, private moments, memoirs, photos or songs that have been of great significance throughout your life can now be conveniently stored in one place. Should you wish, you can also share information with friends and family through Facebook. Create your Life Album by choosing photographs that reflect your life. Compile the Soundtrack of your Life by selecting songs that have captured the fun, the laughter, and the tears. Reflect on your life and record details of life affirming occasions, experiences and memories that have meant so much to you in Events. Plan ahead and put together your own Bucket List so you have a complete list of the goals and dreams you have yet to achieve. Legacy Organiser enables you to record important information relating to your death including your final intentions and wishes for all aspects of your farewell, your funeral arrangements, and your digital estate. Create and take control of your own legacy, of who you are and how you want to be remembered."
  • As written in "My Wonderful Life", "You only get one chance to make a last impression" - "Make funeral plans. Write your obituary. Design your own headstone. Take care of your pets".
  • The project "Remembered Voices, which I personally found extremely moving, allows you to record your voice and enter it to their voice library. We can leave behind what we sounded like, how we laughed, how we phrased our sentences. We can leave behind a bedtime story or a lullaby for our children, or leave behind our life story told in our own voice.
  • Recollect offers something a bit different: "We archive everything you do online". This websites offers to archive pictures, tweets, and check-ins from various accounts across the internet, back it up and allow you to download it anytime, and allows you to search among tweets, Foursquare check-ins, Instagrams and Flickr photos, at the same time. While this could be good for you, it could be invaluable to your heirs. 
  • GEN-ARC (which acquired Scangaroo) "provides key features and functionality that are critical to permanently preserve the priceless content in your family archive (your “GEN-ARC™”) and ensuring it remains viewable by forward generations". 
  • Final Fling allows you to "record Wishes, start a bucketlist, leave last requests, pick funeral music, make a Will, appoint a trusted Keyholder"..."A Treasure Trove for digital legacies: tell your story, leave messages, pass on pics or home movies"... "A Scrapbook to share tributes, ideas, inspiration for fitting ends".
Some of these sites were shut down: 
  • "1000 memories" - "Organize, share and discover the old photos and memories of your family and friends. We help bring the albums, scrapbooks, and photo-filled shoeboxes of our lives out of the closet and into an online, shareable space where they can be remembered and celebrated, together in one place." October 2012 update: the website was acquired by Ancestry.com and was later shut down.  
  • Memolane shut down at February 2013. 

I have found many of these links at The Digital Beyond and credit and thanks go to Evan Carroll and John Romano for compiling it. 

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