My social network appears to be wide, diverse and technologically savvy enough that I have a large number of friends and acquaintances with large Internet footprints. That includes people with a presence on a variety of social networking sites like facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr feeds, multiple email accounts and even blogs.

Having a broad sample of such connections means that life cycle events are not unusual in this group either. That includes death. I have now – several times – had the oddly jarring event of having a message reminding me about a birthday of a friend who passed away or a suggestion to reconnect with a long-dead relative and similar communications from across the chasm – as it were.

There is both joy and sorrow associated with these episodes. The sorrow is obvious but the joy is in spending a few moments reviewing their blog thoughts or their facebook photos and, in essence, celebrating their life in quiet, solitary reflection. And it provides these people with their own little slice of immortality. It bolsters the line from the movie The Social Network saying that “The Internet isn’t written in pencil; it’s written in ink”.

This got me thinking.  In an odd way, this phenomena struck me as an opportunity.  An opportunity for a new Internet application.

I see this opportunity as having at least two possibilities. The first would be a service (or application) that seeks out the Internet footprint of the deceased and expunges and closes all the accounts. This might have to include a password cracking program and some clever manner to deduce or infer login names – for the cases where little is known about the person’s online activities.  It may be the case that after closing the account, the person may live on in the databases hidden behind the websites that are never purged, but they will be gone from public view.

The alternate would serve those who wish to be celebrated and truly immortalized. This would collect the entire presence of a person on the WWW and provide a comprehensive home page to celebrate their life, through their own words and images. This home page would include links to all surviving accounts, photos, posts and comments thereby providing a window into a life lived (albeit online).

In an odd way, this creates an avatar that is a more accurate representation of yourself than anything you could possibly create on Second Life or any similar virtual world. One could certainly imagine, though, taking all that data input and using it to create a sort of stilted avatar driven by the content entered over the course of your life.  It might only have actions based on what was collected about you but a more sophisticated variation would derive behaviors or likely responses based on projections of your “collected works”.

Immortality?  Not exactly.  But an amazing simulation.