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The web of the dead

The deceased have a lively social network of their own, finds
linton chiswick

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Thanks to the Web 2.0 revolution, everybody has a home on the net. There are social networks for fit people (WeEndure.com), for fashionable people (ShareYourLook.com), arrogant people (IntellectConnect.com)... and now, fresh from a venture capital injection worth $1.5m, there's a social network for dead people.

Respectance picks up where tributes and remembrances on FaceBook and MySpace leave off. Living and breathing web users (other business models presumably proved impractical) can sign up for an account, and

 

publish 'tributes' - memorial pages, really - to friends and relatives who have passed away. In line with the Facebook format, it's easy to post photographs, videos, stories and
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comments to tribute pages, creating an ad hoc network around both the remembered and the remembering, a growing web of dead people and the lives they've touched.

It doesn't take long to grasp that Respectance is really about the living. The tools of Web 2.0 - tools of communication and self-expression - are presumably helpful in the grieving process. It's arguable

 

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