Afterlife Facebook

You don't realize how many emails you get until you leave town and forget to put on your OUT OF TOWN signal. Finally, the Great Plotnik has worked this way through a virtual stack of messages, some for business or pleasure, most for ads. None were from the Bob Marley Zion Boutique on the island of Carriacou. A lot were friend requests from Facebook.

Is Plotnik alone in feeling a little smarmy when he browses through his Facebook page and looks at photos put up by friends of friends of friends, people he doesn't even know? It's kind of like rummaging through someone elses's underwear drawer. Should he care what someone he doesn't know posted on someone else he doesn't know's wall?

In this morning's paper, there was a notice for a new startup that wants you to sign up with them so that after you die they can remove things like your Facebook page. BZWZ and Plottie were talking about that the other night in Brooklyn.

The conversation came from another one that The Great FiveHead had started, when she was talking about a mutual friend whose mother has come from Nicaragua to live with her daughter in Maryland. The mom is an ardent Evangelical Christian and the daughter is not. Mom is concerned about how, after she and her daughter and her daughter's husband die, they will all keep in touch, seeing as the Mom will be playing shuffleboard in Heaven and the daughter and her husband will be roasting in Hell.

Plot suggested Facebook -- a new application called Afterlife Facebook, so you can find out once and for all who went where.

(If you have drunk the Kool Aid, you will already be sure they will be using old IBM PCs in Hell and the very latest Macs in Heaven.)

(The Help Lines will all still be handled from Hell, though. Some things never change.)

This led to the real-life issue of how on-line info tends to stay there long after you do. It has not been an issue yet, because most users are still relatively young, but it is going to become one. We have all read, say, undated restaurant reviews that were written five years ago, and make the place sound great, but when you get there the restaurant has been out of business for three. Nobody took down the review.

But how about people?

Plot has wanted to get in touch with his Dad for years. Can you imagine how many Friend Requests John Lennon gets? Afterlife Facebook. It's going to happen.