I was reading an interesting piece on HowStuffWorks about what happens to your social networking site account(s) when you die. The good news is, whether something good or bad happens, you won’t have to bother (because you’d be dead, remember?) The bad news is, that you’d always leave someone who cared about you behind and s/he might get emotionally hurt.

Interestingly, many sites don’t have a definite policy on what to do with accounts of deceased users. Facebook, however, does. It locks access and makes your profile into a ‘memorial’ (deleting all contact info and status updates) so that only friends can visit, leave messages and share grief. Very noble move indeed.

That being said, I however would care less. I mean you’re dead right…. so who gives a f**k! As for all those people who could possibly spam your profile, there is no guarantee that they wouldn’t do so by any other means (e.g. bitching about you at your freaking funeral…. To them I could only say: atleast show some respect for the dead!)

But there is an important point that I’m trying to make behind all this. That social networking on internet was meant as a sidekick to real life, and it is only us who have put a giant ‘S’ on its chest (and underwear on the pant!) to turn it into a superhero. It doesn’t matter if you have 400 friends on Facebook or 10,000 Orkut scraps… If you just pick that phone up once in a while and call up an old friend, you would end up being happier than logging in a hundred times a day!

And eventually, there’ll be a lot less people bitching about you at your funeral, especially the ones who could have said…. the bastard had time for just ten scraps in his entire life! :)