As we noted over a year ago in “Issues: Transfer of Personal Online Accounts to Third Parties“, what happens to your account after your death depends on the stated policies of that website. This morning on Skype Journal, Phil Wolff wrote the following:

MySpace says your account dies with you. They mean your login information and all the data you created and used. This includes your buddy list, avatars, history logs, text chat archives, etc.

This is very important when applied to accounts that are for groups, bands, etc.:

That’s immensely useful information, rich in hard won social capital. People use IM to organize their churches, school projects, political clubs, work teams; their real world and online lives.

It becomes necessary to find a website that will allow for transfer of login rights and information to other individuals. In this case, it is much easier to register your own domain, setup the hosting of the site, and then document all of this information so that someone else in the organization can continue the foundation you created without having to build from scratch.

Read Phil’s full comments contained in the article, “Your MySpaceIM account dies when you do“.

The Internet is a unique form of communication because it allows us to become penpals with virtually anyone in the world.  However, due to its disjointed nature, the passing of someone can be just as painful as your close family, but the ability for closure is sometimes denied to us.  Since a person can develop relationships online that, in many cases, are unknown to their own family, the family is then unaware of how close online bonds are and how those bonds are severed completely, often without any further word of what has happened to their online friend.

If anything, read this story and understand just how important it is to be ready before you are gone.

Several bloggers just posted a few days ago contemplating what would happen to their blog/site if they should pass away.  Many had the idea that there should be a way of archiving information for the future.  As pointed out in one post, what format would best serve to carry on into the future?  We don’t know what may happen with Internet 2.0 (not Web 2.0, but the next version/replacement of the Internet) and whether or not our material will carry over.

If any of you saw Johnny Mnemonic, you saw a potential future of the Internet that was really cool, but have you ever thought that maybe files/sites as we know them today will no longer exist in their current format? Imagine being a digital archaeologist in the future trying to extract data from a PDF when the format has been dead for several decades.  Imagine right now trying to get some data off an old 8″ floppy disk and you’ll have a pretty good idea of just how difficult it might be.

Thus, the question is, just how much of what you maintain as digital work should be extracted into other forms of media?  Do you have a huge photo library on Picasa or Flickr?  Maybe you need to print some photo albums just in case (and these sites have been known to lose/delete files on occasion).  Do you have a large journal or blog?  Maybe you need to export it to your word processor, clean it up, and print it (preferrably something other than just some paper you have lying around… like lulu.com, maybe?).

Or, better yet, let’s all keep an eye out for a trustworthy archive service that will allow you to do what you already do, but know that your data is backed up regularly in another location so that it is recoverable and preserved.  However, get ready to pay through the nose too… after all, once you are gone, who keeps up the payments for the backup?

(Here’s a thought, why not allow for those who wish the site to continue to make donations for the preservation of the site like museums do?  Hmmm.)