10 ms·

1000Memories: A Loved One Has Passed Away. What’s Your Digital Strategy?

130 points by jonathanbgood 16y ago

Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
Hi all, We'd love to have your feedback or comments. If you'd like our help in setting up a profile, please get in touch at contact@1000memories.com Thanks, Brett, Rudy and Jonathan
- jessep 16y ago
  It looks really nice. Small comment: On the main page for a memorial, when the box pops up asking if I know the person, it says "show your support". I found that phrasing a little odd, less heartfelt than I'd expect. I'd change it to 'show your love'.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    "Love" might be a little too strong for people who were only marginally connected to the deceased.
    - aberman 16y ago
      Show your caring?
      - hugh3 16y ago
        I don't like "caring" as a noun much. I think "support" is good -- it means "emotional support for the family", not "I support this dead dude, he was cool".
- minus1 16y ago
  I'm a little late to the party, but thought I would comment. I will admit that at first I really disliked this idea. There is something distasteful about profiting from death. After giving it some thought, and looking over some of the memorials, I really think you have something. Of course the key will be to treat people fairly and with respect and kindness. I have seen the poor implementations currently used by funeral homes. Even those seem to be a true source of comfort for the family. Good luck, I hope you're successful.
petervandijck 16y ago
I don't see why my loved ones need to be on the internet. If they have to be, the main value is long-term-ness. Whatever info/pictures I put out there, I'd likely want that to still be there in 10, 20, 50 years. Nobody has done that type of long-termness well, so far, that I know off. What I might want to put online is their digital archive: the stuff they chose to share online while alive, archived for a long time.
- IgorPartola 16y ago
  I don't think this is limited to people that have passed on. I want my photos out there for a long time, but I don't want to hand everything over to flickr/picasa, etc.
  - moserware 16y ago
    What about archive.org?
    - IgorPartola 16y ago
      That's not quite it. For one, I have no control over what gets archived. My site with the photos would likely not get much traffic since it's only interesting to my family and friends. Also, it's a lot of content: currently around 4GB and growing. Instead, I'd like to be able to pre-pay for a managed server to run with a guarantee for the next say 100 years. If in that time, any of my descendants decide that what I have there is worthwhile they can renew it for another 100.
- chwahoo 16y ago
  I really like the idea of making it easy for people to share pictures and stories of loved ones who have passed one. I particularly think people who couldn't make it to the funeral would enjoy the chance to read the stories that friends have posted. I'm not sold on permanent archiving as a selling point, given that companies (particularly startups) aren't permanent. I do hope they explore ways to support themselves by selling a bound paper form of the contributions to a site or allow users to download a nicely designed PDF containing the pictures and stories.
innovate 16y ago
nice. solid execution on a great concept.
willwagner 16y ago
I really like this idea and execution. Really nice work! I think a good feature to add would be some sort of kiosk mode that could be used during a wake or reception by just putting a web browser on one of your pages and it would rotate through photos, guestbook entries, etc. like a slide show but would drop in to the guestbook with a mouse click and go back to the slideshow after the page went idle for a while. Another good feature would be a way for people to buy coffee-table books of a site to save as a personal memory. I'm certain with some effort and partnerships with a publisher, you could create a well designed book automatically from the data you have. I put together a video montage of my father after he passed away and having something tangible that you can have of a loved one is always comforting. Finally as a way to generate traffic, I'd consider building some killer example sites of celebrities as soon as the news breaks of some celebrity's passing.
- jessep 16y ago
  I agree with all of these suggestions. The Kiosk mode strikes me as particularly creative and insightful. There's a startup that let's people create a wedding guestbook with video snips people record on a laptop, that'd be an awesome thing, people teliing stories about the deceased into a camera and aggregating them into a video.
tomjen3 16y ago
My digital strategy? Dry my eyes with two pieces of cloth? On the serious side of things, I guess this would be useful for some people but when I read the article, I assumed it was about how you would notify friends and family online - I doubt that many young people read the arbituary in the local newspaper often enough for you to find them there.
contagionhealth 16y ago
Would love to see a partnership with Legacy Locker here: http://legacylocker.com/ http://legacylocker.com/
keltex 16y ago
"They’ll develop their business model over time". That would be a little scary to me as an investor.
- hugh3 16y ago
  So would the fact that they have (sensible) ethical issues about extracting money from grieving relatives.
  - pg 16y ago
    As an investor, I like that. I think this is a business where it's a real competitive advantage not to be jerks.
    - Be_Silly 16y ago
      Sure, but i'd rather know how that's codified into business rules and policies. I try to do that for my own company. People change, staff moves, even if infrequently, you get a new CEO . . . qualifying this as a personal trait isn't much substance in my book. It's not concrete, even if it's an honorable intention. Sorry, but i don't see how you hinge a business plan on merely an intention to play nice. Google codified their original intent roughly as not doing crappy flashy adverts, so that's a tangible. But some processes are never immediately visible to customers, and how you you apply attitude as a criteria to that? If you run a shop which prides itself on exceptional behaviour (distinct from a market around you where you see values are a real reason hindering growth) is it not reassuring to try at leat to find some measurables? One might manage a lot of this in interview for new hires, or you might insist on a certain policy regards customer support, such as never giving a stonewall answer per a policy but giving your reps the power to look into a problem. What i'm suggestig is you can do wonders with company culture if you nurture it like a first born, but are there not times when this can be checked against behaviour more thoroughly? I'm thinking about the number of times my cellular reps promise me, voice and in writing, they'll fix a billing glitch, and not once have they come through. That's possibly measurable, as an example. As in "why does customer x contact us so much?"
    - 16y ago
teye 16y ago
Could they not have gotten a better domain? Also, the Bad Religion song lyrics are beating them in search results. Great concept, good execution.
- Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
  Thanks for the compliments, Teye. We're working on SEO -- doing a lot better after yesterday's traffic. If there's something obvious we're not doing to improve our results, please let us know! Thanks.
patio11 16y ago
I like Gary Vaderchuck's take on this: everything we do today will be recorded for the benefits of our grandkids. Soon enough, this will be essentially non-optional. Act accordingly. This is a sea change in just the last few years, too -- I lost everything I wrote in college with the exception of one paper, but now with Dropbox I'm likely to never lose anything I create ever again. In a few decades I'll probably need a personal archivist to sift through for the good bits and give my grandkids something with a narrative to it.
- dot 16y ago
  Your last sentence. There's a million dollars there.
qeorge 16y ago
Small bug: On this page, there's an "unrendered" — http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories
- Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
  Good spot. We've fixed it. Thanks, George.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
grellas 16y ago
I wonder how this might change the way we remember those long departed. We are a relational by nature as human beings and this means that connections fade with time. Young people by nature tend not to care about the life challenges faced by grandpa and grandma all those many years ago. We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two. Maybe those of us who are older will well remember a film star out of the 1940s such as Loretta Young but young people don't (and for those who are older, who remembers or cares about Gloria Swanson as a sex goddess of the 1920s, for example). The same can be said of any other type of famous person. Today, some of us remember a few notable things that Ike did, for instance, but as we go back further, say, to William Howard Taft, we remember or care little or nothing about his life and the issues faced by that generation (even more so as we recede further - Franklin Pierce anyone?). Indeed, this is one of the problems of getting older. As our prime fades, and as things move on, fewer and fewer people care about what we did with our life's struggles and we can feel progressively marginalized and isolated as we enter into our 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. Only those who are our contemporaries can reflect upon and appreciate our life's accomplishments as they come to know us and as they share the common experiences with us. In time, of course, people die off and then those who relate to the remaining older people become fewer and fewer until the isolation is nearly complete for someone who lives a really long life. For the most part, immediate family might care but no one else does. For the person who is 100 today, no one cares what it was like to live through Prohibition or to have experienced talkies for the first time, or to wonder at the marvel of air travel that no one had ever seen before or to grow up and raise a family in the rural midwest of long ago. That time has come and gone and we, as a relational people, just can't relate any more. Today, I can look at old photos of my parents (both deceased) and my heart is moved. I can do the same with photos of grandparents whom I actually knew and can relate but with nowhere near the same intensity. But, then, I look at old photos of my great grandparents in the old country from which my parents ultimately emigrated and I feel nothing - it is just some bearded guy posing for a picture in some little hut from a distant land and a distant time. I love the study of history precisely because it helps bring to life how people lived and dealt with the challenges of their generation, no matter how distant from ours. But most of the events of humanity are forever buried in history in a way that they can never be known. Think of all the millions of people from the 1830s, for example, who lived and died while facing many of the same issues we do today - how am I going to make something of myself? how do I find my life's mate? where do I want to live? do I want to go to school and what should I study? how do I try to change my world for the better? For all those lives, the events and the subsequent memories were as vivid as could be as the lives were lived out and as a generation or two that knew those people remembered or were told stories about what they had done. But, given the passage of enough time, none of this matters one whit to those who live today. Now, nearly two centuries later, only a few high points of that era are remembered and often only from a sterile textbook type of memory (important historical "facts" in a book) about which few people care. Will a perpetual digital presence on the web change any of this over time? Of course, it can help make vivid the lives of those we knew or directly remember from our lives and those of our contemporaries. It can lessen the "out of sight, out of mind" mode of forgetfulness and make us more easily appreciate those whom we knew and loved or respected while they lived. In this sense, the impact can be profound and particularly so concerning those closest to us in life - it is like my being moved by looking at the old photos of my parents, potentially magnified many times over in having been enriched by stories, anecdotes, written memorabilia, etc. not only from immediate family members but also from friends, acquaintances, and others. What a rich treasure trove this might be to help us remember and honor the memory of those to whom we related and all the more so the closer they were to us in life. But what will thousands or millions of such narratives mean to those who live two centuries from today looking back on it all. Yes, it might be a rich vein for historians trying to identify broader trends and issues of our era but does it matter beyond that? In other words, would we even care to remember the stories of millions of persons with whom we are unconnected in every way, even if they were ancestors in our direct family line? I don't know but I would suspect that this would be much like looking at that old photo of my great grandparents in the old country. It might be interesting for a passing glance but nothing more. As relational people, it is hard to relate to those with whom we have no connection (or at least very little connection), and the memories of those lives in this sense would be relevant only for a time, i.e., as long as those who could relate still lived. All this is another way of saying that, in time, the mark we make in this world will inevitably fade. And, for this reason, I doubt that it can be captured by online digital preservation in any way that will prove meaningful beyond the lives of our contemporaries. All that said, this is a beautiful idea and this piece is a thoughtful evocation of its possibilities. It just can't be overstretched to achieve a goal that is, in my view, beyond the limits of human capacity. We can all be memorialized to a point but the limit is bound by those who remember being able to relate to who we were and what we did. At some point, that connection breaks and the memories fade, no matter how well those lives may be documented online.
endlessvoid94 16y ago
How do I change the main image for the page after I've uploaded other photos?
- Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
  You can click the "Edit" button at the bottom of any memorial page. Please email me directly if you have any questions or suggestions.
benatkin 16y ago
The sample site, a memorial to a relative of one of the founders, is fantastic. Great execution. I don't like the lack of a business model, though. I think it would be better if they charged a reasonable amount up-front, that included the ability to export all of the content in a nice format. I don't like where TechCrunch went with it. They called Legacy's "cash extraction procedures" cheesy. I don't think that's the right word for it. I think, as described by the article, unethical would be the right word. I looked at Respectance's pricing. It seems they make it so the person who create the site and who sponsor it can be different people. I don't see great memorials starting like this: A) someone decides to create a site, but doesn't want to put too much into it B) the community rallies around it C) a generous member of the community forks over the cash. I think more often, great things are created by people who care about it. Like the sample site. The founder put a lot of effort into making his loved one's site great. I'm sure in the face of that, $59 or so wouldn't have stopped him. As for free trials, I don't really think they're appropriate. I think it's what makes it feel like "cash extraction" rather than paying for a valuable service. I think that the only free trial that's needed is the ability to create a site, and pay a one-time fee to get it published, and to keep it online, accepting contributed content, and with an export tool.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
hermanthegerman 16y ago
Is it ok to have a personal homepage there ? I've been looking for a online community where the other users don't annoy me for quite a while.
aneth 16y ago
Can you really say "forever" on $20,000 of YC funding? Is there a foundation set up to host the site in the likely event that investors balk? Are you spending your YC funds on offsite backups and some sort of forever RAID? I'd much rather trust the long term hosting of my memories to a company that is around for the long haul like Wordpress or Google, or one of many other companies with products that aren't marketed for this purpose, but provide similar (actually a lot more) functionality.
- mleonhard 16y ago
  I'm creating RestBackup.com right now and my next project will probably be RestArchive.com. I'm interested in the problem of data archival for regular people. I've been thinking about the problem of business continuity. One possible solution to the problem is to endow a trust to maintain the archive in the event that the business fails. I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks about this.
  - Be_Silly 16y ago
    You know what, permanent archive isn't for "regular people". For it to be archive, you have to start guessing at what future generations want, will be interested in, their mode of access, and you're at a level of basic precision here beyond what regular joes will pay for right now. I inherently dislike the use of the word archive in pet projects. We're just staring to go through a phase now where storage is chancing at maturing on things like bit level integrity, but ther hold back is the huge money that three leter acronym companies can charge for capacity, two orders more than the underlying spinning rust bare cost. If you ar interested in finding out some failed big budget projects, in the EU you could contact the DGXIII initiative, whove funded or match funded quite a lot of this kind of thing. Realize that's not a short route to enlightenment, heck i spent years in touch with that group. I'm just saying there are, you know, things like national libraries who care quite a bit about all of this, and a few phone calls could get you a bunch of info as to where ohers have met dead ends. I'll say i'm not without my own reservatos about trans-national IGO EU tech projects, but there's been a strong attempt to address whole areas of real concern in archive for 20 years now in that group, and you might pick up quite a bit which could spur you onwards. Not a summer holiday project, though, i don't think. I'm really truly amazed at Y-comb startups being in this field. I've personally thrown a dozen Y-comb sized budgets at the area trying to get personal satisfaction. But don't listen to the self - inflicted poor! :-)
calvinfr 16y ago
Looking forward to some good competition! We just launched as well (but before you guys) - we're also free - wwww.people2remember.com Amazing similarities between your product and ours - though I must admit your UI is very clean and concise. Nicely done!

130 points by jonathanbgood 16y ago

Hi all, We'd love to have your feedback or comments. If you'd like our help in setting up a profile, please get in touch at contact@1000memories.com Thanks, Brett, Rudy and Jonathan

jessep 16y ago
It looks really nice. Small comment: On the main page for a memorial, when the box pops up asking if I know the person, it says "show your support". I found that phrasing a little odd, less heartfelt than I'd expect. I'd change it to 'show your love'.
- hugh3 16y ago
  "Love" might be a little too strong for people who were only marginally connected to the deceased.
  - aberman 16y ago
    Show your caring?
    - hugh3 16y ago
      I don't like "caring" as a noun much. I think "support" is good -- it means "emotional support for the family", not "I support this dead dude, he was cool".
minus1 16y ago
I'm a little late to the party, but thought I would comment. I will admit that at first I really disliked this idea. There is something distasteful about profiting from death. After giving it some thought, and looking over some of the memorials, I really think you have something. Of course the key will be to treat people fairly and with respect and kindness. I have seen the poor implementations currently used by funeral homes. Even those seem to be a true source of comfort for the family. Good luck, I hope you're successful.

petervandijck 16y ago

I don't see why my loved ones need to be on the internet. If they have to be, the main value is long-term-ness. Whatever info/pictures I put out there, I'd likely want that to still be there in 10, 20, 50 years. Nobody has done that type of long-termness well, so far, that I know off. What I might want to put online is their digital archive: the stuff they chose to share online while alive, archived for a long time.

IgorPartola 16y ago
I don't think this is limited to people that have passed on. I want my photos out there for a long time, but I don't want to hand everything over to flickr/picasa, etc.
- moserware 16y ago
  What about archive.org?
  - IgorPartola 16y ago
    That's not quite it. For one, I have no control over what gets archived. My site with the photos would likely not get much traffic since it's only interesting to my family and friends. Also, it's a lot of content: currently around 4GB and growing. Instead, I'd like to be able to pre-pay for a managed server to run with a guarantee for the next say 100 years. If in that time, any of my descendants decide that what I have there is worthwhile they can renew it for another 100.
chwahoo 16y ago
I really like the idea of making it easy for people to share pictures and stories of loved ones who have passed one. I particularly think people who couldn't make it to the funeral would enjoy the chance to read the stories that friends have posted. I'm not sold on permanent archiving as a selling point, given that companies (particularly startups) aren't permanent. I do hope they explore ways to support themselves by selling a bound paper form of the contributions to a site or allow users to download a nicely designed PDF containing the pictures and stories.

innovate 16y ago

nice. solid execution on a great concept.

willwagner 16y ago

I really like this idea and execution. Really nice work! I think a good feature to add would be some sort of kiosk mode that could be used during a wake or reception by just putting a web browser on one of your pages and it would rotate through photos, guestbook entries, etc. like a slide show but would drop in to the guestbook with a mouse click and go back to the slideshow after the page went idle for a while. Another good feature would be a way for people to buy coffee-table books of a site to save as a personal memory. I'm certain with some effort and partnerships with a publisher, you could create a well designed book automatically from the data you have. I put together a video montage of my father after he passed away and having something tangible that you can have of a loved one is always comforting. Finally as a way to generate traffic, I'd consider building some killer example sites of celebrities as soon as the news breaks of some celebrity's passing.

jessep 16y ago
I agree with all of these suggestions. The Kiosk mode strikes me as particularly creative and insightful. There's a startup that let's people create a wedding guestbook with video snips people record on a laptop, that'd be an awesome thing, people teliing stories about the deceased into a camera and aggregating them into a video.

tomjen3 16y ago

My digital strategy? Dry my eyes with two pieces of cloth? On the serious side of things, I guess this would be useful for some people but when I read the article, I assumed it was about how you would notify friends and family online - I doubt that many young people read the arbituary in the local newspaper often enough for you to find them there.

contagionhealth 16y ago

Would love to see a partnership with Legacy Locker here: http://legacylocker.com/ http://legacylocker.com/

keltex 16y ago

"They’ll develop their business model over time". That would be a little scary to me as an investor.

hugh3 16y ago
So would the fact that they have (sensible) ethical issues about extracting money from grieving relatives.
- pg 16y ago
  As an investor, I like that. I think this is a business where it's a real competitive advantage not to be jerks.
  - Be_Silly 16y ago
    Sure, but i'd rather know how that's codified into business rules and policies. I try to do that for my own company. People change, staff moves, even if infrequently, you get a new CEO . . . qualifying this as a personal trait isn't much substance in my book. It's not concrete, even if it's an honorable intention. Sorry, but i don't see how you hinge a business plan on merely an intention to play nice. Google codified their original intent roughly as not doing crappy flashy adverts, so that's a tangible. But some processes are never immediately visible to customers, and how you you apply attitude as a criteria to that? If you run a shop which prides itself on exceptional behaviour (distinct from a market around you where you see values are a real reason hindering growth) is it not reassuring to try at leat to find some measurables? One might manage a lot of this in interview for new hires, or you might insist on a certain policy regards customer support, such as never giving a stonewall answer per a policy but giving your reps the power to look into a problem. What i'm suggestig is you can do wonders with company culture if you nurture it like a first born, but are there not times when this can be checked against behaviour more thoroughly? I'm thinking about the number of times my cellular reps promise me, voice and in writing, they'll fix a billing glitch, and not once have they come through. That's possibly measurable, as an example. As in "why does customer x contact us so much?"
  - 16y ago

teye 16y ago

Could they not have gotten a better domain? Also, the Bad Religion song lyrics are beating them in search results. Great concept, good execution.

Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
Thanks for the compliments, Teye. We're working on SEO -- doing a lot better after yesterday's traffic. If there's something obvious we're not doing to improve our results, please let us know! Thanks.

patio11 16y ago

I like Gary Vaderchuck's take on this: everything we do today will be recorded for the benefits of our grandkids. Soon enough, this will be essentially non-optional. Act accordingly. This is a sea change in just the last few years, too -- I lost everything I wrote in college with the exception of one paper, but now with Dropbox I'm likely to never lose anything I create ever again. In a few decades I'll probably need a personal archivist to sift through for the good bits and give my grandkids something with a narrative to it.

dot 16y ago
Your last sentence. There's a million dollars there.

qeorge 16y ago

Small bug: On this page, there's an "unrendered" — http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories

Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
Good spot. We've fixed it. Thanks, George.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

grellas 16y ago

I wonder how this might change the way we remember those long departed. We are a relational by nature as human beings and this means that connections fade with time. Young people by nature tend not to care about the life challenges faced by grandpa and grandma all those many years ago. We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two. Maybe those of us who are older will well remember a film star out of the 1940s such as Loretta Young but young people don't (and for those who are older, who remembers or cares about Gloria Swanson as a sex goddess of the 1920s, for example). The same can be said of any other type of famous person. Today, some of us remember a few notable things that Ike did, for instance, but as we go back further, say, to William Howard Taft, we remember or care little or nothing about his life and the issues faced by that generation (even more so as we recede further - Franklin Pierce anyone?). Indeed, this is one of the problems of getting older. As our prime fades, and as things move on, fewer and fewer people care about what we did with our life's struggles and we can feel progressively marginalized and isolated as we enter into our 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. Only those who are our contemporaries can reflect upon and appreciate our life's accomplishments as they come to know us and as they share the common experiences with us. In time, of course, people die off and then those who relate to the remaining older people become fewer and fewer until the isolation is nearly complete for someone who lives a really long life. For the most part, immediate family might care but no one else does. For the person who is 100 today, no one cares what it was like to live through Prohibition or to have experienced talkies for the first time, or to wonder at the marvel of air travel that no one had ever seen before or to grow up and raise a family in the rural midwest of long ago. That time has come and gone and we, as a relational people, just can't relate any more. Today, I can look at old photos of my parents (both deceased) and my heart is moved. I can do the same with photos of grandparents whom I actually knew and can relate but with nowhere near the same intensity. But, then, I look at old photos of my great grandparents in the old country from which my parents ultimately emigrated and I feel nothing - it is just some bearded guy posing for a picture in some little hut from a distant land and a distant time. I love the study of history precisely because it helps bring to life how people lived and dealt with the challenges of their generation, no matter how distant from ours. But most of the events of humanity are forever buried in history in a way that they can never be known. Think of all the millions of people from the 1830s, for example, who lived and died while facing many of the same issues we do today - how am I going to make something of myself? how do I find my life's mate? where do I want to live? do I want to go to school and what should I study? how do I try to change my world for the better? For all those lives, the events and the subsequent memories were as vivid as could be as the lives were lived out and as a generation or two that knew those people remembered or were told stories about what they had done. But, given the passage of enough time, none of this matters one whit to those who live today. Now, nearly two centuries later, only a few high points of that era are remembered and often only from a sterile textbook type of memory (important historical "facts" in a book) about which few people care. Will a perpetual digital presence on the web change any of this over time? Of course, it can help make vivid the lives of those we knew or directly remember from our lives and those of our contemporaries. It can lessen the "out of sight, out of mind" mode of forgetfulness and make us more easily appreciate those whom we knew and loved or respected while they lived. In this sense, the impact can be profound and particularly so concerning those closest to us in life - it is like my being moved by looking at the old photos of my parents, potentially magnified many times over in having been enriched by stories, anecdotes, written memorabilia, etc. not only from immediate family members but also from friends, acquaintances, and others. What a rich treasure trove this might be to help us remember and honor the memory of those to whom we related and all the more so the closer they were to us in life. But what will thousands or millions of such narratives mean to those who live two centuries from today looking back on it all. Yes, it might be a rich vein for historians trying to identify broader trends and issues of our era but does it matter beyond that? In other words, would we even care to remember the stories of millions of persons with whom we are unconnected in every way, even if they were ancestors in our direct family line? I don't know but I would suspect that this would be much like looking at that old photo of my great grandparents in the old country. It might be interesting for a passing glance but nothing more. As relational people, it is hard to relate to those with whom we have no connection (or at least very little connection), and the memories of those lives in this sense would be relevant only for a time, i.e., as long as those who could relate still lived. All this is another way of saying that, in time, the mark we make in this world will inevitably fade. And, for this reason, I doubt that it can be captured by online digital preservation in any way that will prove meaningful beyond the lives of our contemporaries. All that said, this is a beautiful idea and this piece is a thoughtful evocation of its possibilities. It just can't be overstretched to achieve a goal that is, in my view, beyond the limits of human capacity. We can all be memorialized to a point but the limit is bound by those who remember being able to relate to who we were and what we did. At some point, that connection breaks and the memories fade, no matter how well those lives may be documented online.

endlessvoid94 16y ago

How do I change the main image for the page after I've uploaded other photos?

Bretthuneycutt 16y ago
You can click the "Edit" button at the bottom of any memorial page. Please email me directly if you have any questions or suggestions.

benatkin 16y ago

The sample site, a memorial to a relative of one of the founders, is fantastic. Great execution. I don't like the lack of a business model, though. I think it would be better if they charged a reasonable amount up-front, that included the ability to export all of the content in a nice format. I don't like where TechCrunch went with it. They called Legacy's "cash extraction procedures" cheesy. I don't think that's the right word for it. I think, as described by the article, unethical would be the right word. I looked at Respectance's pricing. It seems they make it so the person who create the site and who sponsor it can be different people. I don't see great memorials starting like this: A) someone decides to create a site, but doesn't want to put too much into it B) the community rallies around it C) a generous member of the community forks over the cash. I think more often, great things are created by people who care about it. Like the sample site. The founder put a lot of effort into making his loved one's site great. I'm sure in the face of that, $59 or so wouldn't have stopped him. As for free trials, I don't really think they're appropriate. I think it's what makes it feel like "cash extraction" rather than paying for a valuable service. I think that the only free trial that's needed is the ability to create a site, and pay a one-time fee to get it published, and to keep it online, accepting contributed content, and with an export tool.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

hermanthegerman 16y ago

Is it ok to have a personal homepage there ? I've been looking for a online community where the other users don't annoy me for quite a while.

aneth 16y ago

Can you really say "forever" on $20,000 of YC funding? Is there a foundation set up to host the site in the likely event that investors balk? Are you spending your YC funds on offsite backups and some sort of forever RAID? I'd much rather trust the long term hosting of my memories to a company that is around for the long haul like Wordpress or Google, or one of many other companies with products that aren't marketed for this purpose, but provide similar (actually a lot more) functionality.

mleonhard 16y ago
I'm creating RestBackup.com right now and my next project will probably be RestArchive.com. I'm interested in the problem of data archival for regular people. I've been thinking about the problem of business continuity. One possible solution to the problem is to endow a trust to maintain the archive in the event that the business fails. I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks about this.
- Be_Silly 16y ago
  You know what, permanent archive isn't for "regular people". For it to be archive, you have to start guessing at what future generations want, will be interested in, their mode of access, and you're at a level of basic precision here beyond what regular joes will pay for right now. I inherently dislike the use of the word archive in pet projects. We're just staring to go through a phase now where storage is chancing at maturing on things like bit level integrity, but ther hold back is the huge money that three leter acronym companies can charge for capacity, two orders more than the underlying spinning rust bare cost. If you ar interested in finding out some failed big budget projects, in the EU you could contact the DGXIII initiative, whove funded or match funded quite a lot of this kind of thing. Realize that's not a short route to enlightenment, heck i spent years in touch with that group. I'm just saying there are, you know, things like national libraries who care quite a bit about all of this, and a few phone calls could get you a bunch of info as to where ohers have met dead ends. I'll say i'm not without my own reservatos about trans-national IGO EU tech projects, but there's been a strong attempt to address whole areas of real concern in archive for 20 years now in that group, and you might pick up quite a bit which could spur you onwards. Not a summer holiday project, though, i don't think. I'm really truly amazed at Y-comb startups being in this field. I've personally thrown a dozen Y-comb sized budgets at the area trying to get personal satisfaction. But don't listen to the self - inflicted poor! :-)

calvinfr 16y ago

Looking forward to some good competition! We just launched as well (but before you guys) - we're also free - wwww.people2remember.com Amazing similarities between your product and ours - though I must admit your UI is very clean and concise. Nicely done!