Footnote: "Facebook for the deceased"
Footnote is trying to create "Facebook for the deceased." It's the obituary 2.0 meets the social network, but likely without the permanence of a tombstone.
The site gathers timeline info that you can match up with a person's life. The service also scours public records you can attach to profiles, as Ancestry.com does. The presenter said Footnote now has 80 million profiles online, which are not available anywhere else. All it needs is for those peoples' friends to come online and add the remembrances -- stories and photos -- that aren't in the public domain.
It looks like the service is good for building memorial sites, but I question the model. For one, it's the Web: Not permanent. Although probably not a bad thing for the first few months or years of grieving and remembering that follow a loved one's death.
Secondly, ultimately, I believe this will become a feature of a social network like Facebook, or, as panel judge Jeff Weiner said, for the geneology sites this service will end up competing with.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
