My mom died a few months ago, and I spent a fair amount of time on this kind of thing. Actually having her computer and access to her online banking made things a little easier for us.
I had a deadman switch for my blog once--a post postdated to a week from now, that I would keep going in and postdating. I learned two things. The first is that I should not be trusted with a deadman switch I have to remember every week, because it ended up posting. The second is that no one actually reads my blog, because no one actually thought I was dead, or called me, worried. (My cell phone number was in the post.)
"I’ve often wondered what would happen to my blog here if I got hit by a bus or was assassinated by agents working deep cover for EA. I mean besides the fact that I wouldn’t update it anymore. What is the protocol for when a blogger dies suddenly? Do you log in and post a notice for their readers? Do you take it down? I Googled around for old articles talking about deceased bloggers, and sure enough when I searched for their blogs they were gone. Some of the people seemed semi-famous, enough so that you’d think someone would have taken up the job of caring for it. The most prominent case I found was Cathy Seipp, who seemed to be a widely-read political writer of some sort, and who died of cancer at 50. I searched for her blog, but the only thing I found was blank. She’s only been dead for two years and already her blog is gone."
There are some good ideas in this blog entry about how to prepare for a loved one's death, in the event the loved one has a big online presence. Something to talk about, if you care about someone whom many people Google up.
His post reminded me of the discussion we had about Cory Doctorow's "When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?" (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=681753). The fact is we haven't thought about what happens to the online presence of the deceased since the web is still relatively young. This is indeed a complex situation that I'm sure will grab more and more of people's attention in the near future.
It would be a valuable service to provide online to arrange in case such a unfortunate event does happen. Similar to life insurance, except for your online presence.
This could work as a authoritative service for other social networks that can disable/lock out the profiles and services used when triggered.
Like credentials in escrow. You'd have to have a service that was massive, like a Verisign/Thawt . . . actually an existing SSL certificate provider is perfectly positioned to enter the market.
When you die there's a list of next-of-kin that are contacted with your credentials to various sites, and maybe a prepared (editable or non, depending on preference) obituary.
Stating the problem thus makes it intractably hard. Look at it from the other side: you will die one day, and you need to make preparations for your death that include your online possessions and presence.
I keep a list of passwords and instructions with my will. That's all there is to it. Think things through once and you never have to do it again.
I got stung by this last week - a "low grade common" password I used on perlmonks.org which I didn't care much about was the same password I used when I signed up for this new website a couple of years ago that I didn't care much about at the time ... called twitter... Fast forward a year or two and I hadn't bothered changing the twitter password and a few days after the perlmonks incident became public I start getting spam posted to my twitterstream... Grrr...
(and, in the cleanup job I did I found 56 other websites of varying degrees of "care about" that I was using the same password on...)
I still haven't decided how much effort to put into ensuring this doesn't happen again - individual passwords for every website is _doable_ but the convenience tradeoff is not insignificant... (anyone know a password safe type program that runs on Mac, linux, and iPhone, and will sync databases between the three?)
That I can never understand. I'm a control freak. I'm a spider, and I'm not going to let a small thing like death limit the reach of my web. (muhahahahahaha..)
I am accomplishment-oriented rather than experience-oriented [1], and perhaps a lot of folks on HN are the same. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense of accomplishment and impact on the world, than from experiential pleasures, or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.
[1] Citations please? I remember reading something like that dichotomy, but I can't find it.
I had a deadman switch for my blog once--a post postdated to a week from now, that I would keep going in and postdating. I learned two things. The first is that I should not be trusted with a deadman switch I have to remember every week, because it ended up posting. The second is that no one actually reads my blog, because no one actually thought I was dead, or called me, worried. (My cell phone number was in the post.)