As social media quickly replaces our photo albums, telephone books/directories and even our landlines – what happens in today’s social media rich world when we or our friends & family logout from our real world?

As a grieving relative, friend or lover where do we turn when dusty memorabilia no longer hides away in attics, but in tagged photos across Flickr, Facebook etc. I discovered Legacy Locker, a way to “protect your online assets”. For a one time fee of about £150 I can assign beneficiaries just like in a will and store any login details for my friends and family to login to.

For me I personally don’t like the idea of planning my death at the age of 20. My Mum works with old people, and even then they take a lot of persuasion to write their own will. So I turned to researching what some of the social media sites offer when you die – for free!

Facebook

Your family can request your profile to be taken off their servers or they can change your profile to that of a ‘memorial state’ which removes status update features, but keeps your photos and comments alive – for your confirmed friends only to see. Your personal account messages are never released – which makes complete sense to me!

Flickr

Flickr keeps the account mostly open upon notification from your family, but will keep private photos private.

Hotmail and Gmail

You can order a copy of a CD with all of the decease user’s messages on it, but you must provide them with a death certificate and proof of power of attorney. Makes sense to me!

(Quitter logo from Jan Lukas – Thanks! http://www.janlukacs.ro/quitter/)