Originally published at: Create a note that can be viewed after your death on the We Expire site | Boing Boing
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If this service depends on entrusting information to a person who will take action to retrieve your note after you die then why not just skip the middleman and put the note in a sealed envelope marked “open only in the event of my death”?
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It could burn up in a house fire?
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Silly, this is obviously much better, because it is done on a computer. That alone makes it patentable in the US, and then you can release your horde of patent attorneys and actually make money from it.
(Sigh.)
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Pretty sure We Expire will expire before I do, anyway.
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Less likely to go defunct in a few years though.
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Yeah, reading about this, all I could think of is the average life expectancy of a web site. (It doesn’t help that I was just looking at a recently-posted web page that rounded up a few useful links - and where most of the links were already broken.) The idea that a random website would somehow outlast even a single user isn’t believable. Either this is a conceptual art project not intended to ever actually be used, or they’ve really not considered how many years it would need to stay in operation to be useful for anyone at all.
All this is leaving aside how the site actually works - encoding the text as a QR code (which seems like it would potentially eliminate the need for a website at all), which necessarily limits the amount of text to something relatively small and not-terribly-useful…
Which would be exactly the same problem in this case, as the “note” is actually being solely stored as a QR code being held by the trusted person. They lose the QR code, they’ve lost the note. And the website can go down.
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Ooh, ooh, what if we etch the note onto a metal plate? We could offer plates in aluminum, copper, silver, gold and platinum. We’ll be rich, I tell you, rich!
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My letter to my daughter is saved on my hard drive and backed up on and off site.
A hard copy along with all other important documents are stored on a thumb drive in a real fireproof safe. Original documents are stored in our safe deposit box.
Our daughter has the key for the safe deposit box and the combination to the safe.
Seeing the white light kicked me in the butt to get organized.
I don’t see a need for a QR code but a static QR code can be created that does not need an internet connection, all the text is stored in the code. I may make one and stick it to my will with a silly message just to amuse me from the great beyond and make my kid smile.
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I guess it might make sense for someone who had good reason to think they were likely to die soon (terminal illness, going off to war, planning to end their own life) but for the average person it would be quite a leap of faith.
Plus, holding back a message for after death feels like a bad idea to me. If you’ve got something important to tell someone then do it while you’re still alive. Unless they’re an infant who is still too young to understand the message or something.
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“I told you I was sick.”
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If they don’t let you post that, then “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite” is available.
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I thought about that, but in that case it makes a lot more sense to just write stuff down as part of the pile of papers that your survivors are going to have to deal with, thus making the website completely unnecessary. The website only actually serves a useful purpose in some sort of Hollywood scenario, where one is going off to do something dangerous and might not return, and don’t have time to do much more than jot off a quick note to someone who might need some information if you don’t survive. I.e. not actually useful in reality.
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