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
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'.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don't need to be, but people often wish to do something to memorialize people who've died, and this approach is in many ways better than e.g. putting up a slab of stone with their name on it, or publishing a notice in a newspaper.
No in the internet domain or electronic, but Wilhelm Research have epic amounts of data on film longevity, and you can download freely their 800page illustrated history / report book which is awesome. You find out things like Kodak knowingly sold crappy film stock that would fade to uselessness within a few years, which explains why there's so many 70's and 80's vintage movies no-onecan get on DVD, because the originals are spoiled short of painstaking and hugely expensive restoration. Can't remember if this applied to consumer film, but Kodak sure lost their reputation bad, letting Fujifilm grab the market.
Side note: the true losses i've experienced of family records were precipitated by ignorant relatives disposing of things they had no right to. My only ever data loss was also caused by carelesness or malice by a third party.
As a direct result of this i realy got into learning about everything from backup tape wear to filw system formats, data integrity. I suppose that might be a silver lining, certainly i am able to use what i learned most weeks for work.
But my real concern is how little people understand bit-rot and data integrity in general for storage. My view is nothing is yet truly archival quality. One of the things i learned was the way careful movie studios (used to?) separate their color originals into monochrome R,G,B reels, because the mono stock lasts so much longer, doesn't fade. Also i learned about Technicolor, which uses organic dyes which don't fade or hardly fade. But the original technicolor process is no longer used, apparently the last few lab setups were sold to China. I think China maybe got a good deal, and i wonder if we won't see it making a revival? That thought came courtesy of Andy Grove's recent interview where he observes that if we throw the "low tech" jobs away to other ambitious countries, eventually they innovate with it, like RCA / Westinghouse televisions and then Sony who then outsoruced to Korea who are the present hib of plasmas / lcds and so on.
What i mean is, don't outsource your family records and memories. Write stuff on paper.Print digital picstures on the best current Epson or Canon ink and put them in a dry dark place. Put a lock on it or put it under a attorney managed storage contract so your kids can get access but not throw it away in a fit of upset or stupidity.
As for this service, i admit i've not read much on their site, but where is the front and center discussion of how they've addressed the myriad ways data gets lost / corrupted?
I looked hard at trying to start a service similar to this, but not with the same angle. No way could i make the numbers work on a "freemium" model. Some website outfits do diligent archive style backup for pro photogs, and they charge very serious amounts of money, and i couldn't get any of those on record as to storage policies. It's not just having ZFS, but every app which touches your data better be doing checksums and more, and when i modelled my own idea, i had a 4 - tier multi redundant system that extensively used WORM tape for anything flagged "archive". The numbers got hard at the point the equipment his EOL or cumulative MTBF required preventative reinvestment. I was looking hard at trying to find insurance cover so that, should three data centers all fail, i could at least give some financial condolence to customers / cover lawsuits, but never got right at the kind of person who could quote me. I suppose that would be "cat risk" and i'd need a big "RE" not a front line insurer, but that was only part of my problem. If data is truly private - it might be of a marriage which went wrong and you only want those records to be available after a decent amount of time has passed - you need to build a fairly sensible, but necessarily complex, security model. Then there's the simpler fun of where to store keys, and how do you make any of this easy to use . .
I fear that projects like this risk more tears than they solve problems. The obituary thing is just a gimmick. What print paper runs an obit (for real,not a...
Back then Wilhelm knew that to get his operation off the ground in Iowa, he had to make a splash, so he attacked the big guy, Kodak. Actually Kodak's films were largely state of the art when they came out, which of course is not nearly as good as everyone's films and papers are today. Many imaging researchers question Wilhelm's methods (he won't let anybody in his laboratory) and he made totally wrong predictions about Epson ink jet prints when they first came out (he overlooked ozone effects). He also overweights the effects of light on image lifetime when over 95% of prints are stored most of the time in the dark, where thermal effects are the actors. None the less, his ratings can be useful if read cautiously. He currently has given a "Best in Class" permanence rating to Kodak's ESP ink jet prints, which when you consider the low cost of Kodak's ink jet catridges (compared to HP, Lexmark, Epson and the rest) makes this a good choice.
"Organic dyes" have nothing to do with Technicolor print stability. All films and most colorants (in ink jet, dye transfer, etc.) use organic dyes or organic pigments. What made old Technicolor so stable was that it could produce silver separations of the three primary color records, and it was the silver negatives, which are extremely stable, that can be used to strike new color prints (with their organic dyes). Trouble is, this is a very expensive process. Disney used it for its animated features which it intended to release again and again over many decades. Most studios went for the much less expensive dye originals which are less stable, especially if poorly processed or stored. (New viewing prints can be struck from properly stored master prints.) Modern color movie films are quite stable (science marches on), which is largely why the costly Technicolor separation process gradually disappeared.
Digital systems pose their own problems, of course. There's media obsolescene (8-inch floppies, anyone?), digital integrity (bit drift, etc.), and media integrity (oops, that tape broke again). Much of what keeps archivists busy is deciding protocols for the continuous migration of images from one generation of media to another.
For really good up to date information on image permanence, I recommend the independent, non-profit (unlike Wilhelm) Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They've got some excellent, free downloads on both the basics and the advanced stuff. Wilhelm's book may be free, but it's very old and out of date.
http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/
Oganic dye transfer has superb color stability over time. As one example, whilst Lucas was ruining the original Star Wars with a effective re-write, he relied on a private Technicolor print for the color timing. All the original negatives were faded.
You try to imply the stability is inherent in the mono master separations, but that was done for a lot of movies, with or without Technicolor printing.
The key masters in a Technicolor print are the "matrix" prints, which apply a screened dot pattern of the dyes to a recepticle emulsion which becomes the projection print.
By confusing all of this, you're missing the whole idea. You start talking about modern emulsion "technology marches on" and utterly ignore how bad was the emulsion of the time frame i referenced.
Also, you make an utter mess by saying this: "New viewing prints can be struck from properly stored master prints" which is just nonsense. The original master is out of the camera a negative. Then you rush print that with a transfer stock, against which you mark edits, and then you mark those edits back to the original reels, if you dare or more practically if you have someone sufficiently skilled at splicing the edits. There's a mere handful of people skilled enough to do that - one lady i recall, but not her name, waster her eyesight at the job, but worked on more majr flicks than i could list here if i found the reference.
So, you are wrong about this taking new prints from a master print. A print is a positive. There aren't even any positive - positive transfer stocks available currently in the Kodak catalogue that i'm aware of. The emulsion type was called "interpositive".
I've looked at your website you liked to, but have failed after several attempts to find any published papers, or any names which link back to any journal or conference proceedings.
Care to elucidate your points?
You are of course correct that Technicolor suffered due to cost issues, to the sheer mechanical alinment precision of transferring high resolution mechanical dot screens on small windows half the size of your 135 SLR / Leica "double frame" still camera. I imagine though we could engineer as good or better tolerances with much lower costs today.
Just to be absolutely pedantic, when you say "What made old Technicolor so stable was that it could produce silver separations of the three primary color records" you're really messing with the facts. Technicolor WAS a separation process, in the transfer stage, nothing like "it could produce", rather, it's design included that stage.
There's a diference between dye imbibation and dye chemical crystal formation. In short hand, most experienced technicians and cinematorgraphers i've met or read, use the word "dye process" to mean dye imbibation, not ineterlayer dye formation. Hunt's books are a wonderful intro to all aspects of color, get the earlier versions for review in case later revisions have remoed the chapters on color formation processes.
I note your organization IPI has been about a while, but where can i find your papers archive?
Your later comment, as to Wilhelm, which came across as snarky, rather ignores the fact that the man's main body of work is an excellent start to undertsnading. I don't read papers or books in isolation. If you can point out where their research is wrong, i'd certainly read with interest. But you just came across as if he was a self promoter johnny-come-lately, and even if he actually is, in the whole scheme of things, he's put out more work you can read directly than the site you've linked to or are associated with.
Oh, I forgot. Another good site is http://www.savemymemories.org. It's run by an international imaging association to which most major imaging companies belong. Anything on the site has had to pass muster with a board of imaging scientists.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
I'm thinking there's comment management going on here. Why not engage me? But read me through either way, if you can stomach it. Rebuttal of any of my points should not be hard, i don't imagine what i've said in this discussion is so watertight that a good explanation of well turned out long considered goals, will not make the contrary point. I am curious as to why a downmodded critique of an possibly affiliated company would be good PR on. I don't take it that way though, nothing personal about my words as to my comments in discussion here or who has replied etc. Instead i think commenters here are missing a lot of history as to the market this new outfit is working in. I overlooked this is a Y-Comb startup. Maybe, i'm guessing, but i feel bad at the mere hint of suspicion that my genuine comment was suppressed or reasons of misunderstanding. No worries if i'm wrong.But i'm no bloody shill for a competitor. Maybe it's a new deadly sin or crippling vanity to wonder out loud in the fashion i imagine someone might be who is not utterly green in the world.If i'm brusque writing now it's because i feel insulted. Not slighted. Just if my outlier suspicion is even partially correct, i'm actually insulted there was no reply calling me out for being somehow wrong in a explicable way. If my language is not cool, tell me so, and you have my apologies, but i don;t think my concerns are wrong. It's not even a political position.
pg's comment above is absolutely bloody true: the reputation of the market dealing in memories and particularly photography is so murky as to be abhorrent. I don't think that's much argument though to ignore hat i was saying, so i'll try to explain my background thoughts here . .
This is all anecdotalism, but meant to hint at data you can find yourself from industry bodies, from trade journals and from not a few online discussions. I'm attempting a vignette, a bt of narrative, not thorughness or empiricism.
One side, you've got good photographers loosing wedding gigs to weekend "pros" who just bought a (now cheap, even for great stuff) DSLR, and on the other side Costco minilabs who'll call the cops on you under DMCA for trying to print any photo you take which is "too professional". (Ok, invest in an inkjet, but i'm no fan of the expense of running those, or gold dust expensive ink being "expired" on a fixed date or printer manufacturers keeping in systems which by design wste a 100 bucks of ink just to declog a head that oddly other companies manage not to clog in the first place and on and on ad nauseam).
My (not modded down, yet) comment above mentioned a true scandal - that the world's most respected imaging company dumped less than substandard stock on their most lucrative and high profile customers for more than a decade.
On a photography bent, the last pro level camera i bought, a Nikon D2X cost $5k and was a literal bleeding edge piece of kit. You really had to know what was up with your exposures, the "auto program" mode was a sure fire way to unviewable images. The very best cameras are only now approaching the ease of exposure of film, though they've worked wonders with quantum efficiency so unheard of hand - held shots are possible in almost no-light which stack up in a gallery if processed well. Those really good ones cost similar money, a bit more with the Yen where it is. For those of you who know their photogtaphy, the comparison i have is to print film (negative or "color reversal" stock, to be pedantic. I can put that in a 2 dollar camera and the lattitude means i get a usable shot, corrected in the print often as not, but i can concentrate on what i want to photograph.
This all may seem a digression, but photography was in serious business decline from 1988, the peak of the SLR system camera sales era, epitomised by Minolta, who that year lost their founder and their entire ethic and direction. Right now there's a renaissance, which is wonderful, so wonderful that the cost of technically good photography has become so low, that ...
That's why you need to think about providing a valuable service, not "extracting money."
A potentially good business model in the future could be to provide services such as taking piles of media from the family and compiling it into slideshows, videos, etc.
There is a ton of analog media that people want digitized. Offering this service to mourning families and creating a package that could be purchased by/for members of the family could be lucrative.
I guess there's a bit of ambulance chasing kinda going on here, or coffin chasing i suppose, in my next idea riffing off of yours.
But for the service whch does obits, or for any other frankly, why not try to match normal people who get cited in the press to their death records?
This could easily be a moral quagmire. False matches of any kind could really mess you up if you pitched cold. But if someone goes online and actually registered their dearly beloved, how much would it take to offer an option to pull all reasonable matches, and have a deal to license press photos? My own father got himself to the point of a kind of positive notoriety in his hometown press, campaiging for things like public parks. But the local papers didn't pick up on their own archives, on his death, and so belatedly my Brother dug out some clippings and prodded a obit out of i forget which one of the locals. It could have been done much better, (naturally i'd say that, of course!) and frankly the public obit didn't count for much to us and i know Pop wouldn't have given a hoot, but it would have been neat to have gotten a layout with his mentions and citations as they were originally printed, for distant relatives, all from one place. Somewhere all those clippings are in the files, going back to the thirties. But i'd have hapily paid for them to be rolled up into a package, and probably been happy to pay for a good simple bound letter sized packet.
Hmm, i'd not want to do this if i were doing it for a fairly well known business person, maybe, too much guff gets written which is of no personal interest, but for anything civic, i think it would have a good vibe. Heck, if you were a real tactful charmer, you could look up the recently deceased cross referenced with local fire chiefs and counselors and maybe - because for these people at least, you could be sure as to a match - offer them as a retrospective. I think small town types would be into this kinda thing. If i had to market that i'd mailshot an offer to a cross-section of interesting types and offer freebies if they can link up clubs, veterans associations and the like and sen out so many for free to get word out. Sure, i'd painstakingly copy edit every last word and comma and run my style by a whole bunch of different age groups / demos before sending a single letter. But done right, it could wor well on word of mouth alone. PR is the thing for this, and given the current IT savvy of our senior generation, offline is a good bet as a place to start.
There's something funky in this whold idea though which gets me feeling odd: i really want to see "memorial pages" get screened for checking the person is actually dead.
So, in the name of protecting privacy, of having certainty no-one is at home to nasty pranks (i could imagine this kind of thing being used maliciously without adequate checks, just think Walter Matthau / Jack Lemmon in "Grumpy Old Men" for a a bit of humorous cruelty, heck what else am i going to do in my dotage but bug my buddies and dribble on my grandkids?) anyhoo, you have a model for modest charges right there, to run some basic integrity checks.
The whole problem with freemium is the first hurdle payment. Moreover that hurdle payment needs to be something which is not merely paying for something which was previously given away.
If you want to grow this slowly, but surely, find any connexions between a your obituaried deceased and other contemporaries, but i mean there has to be a way to ask nicely if anyone wants to do the same deal for their late business partner / golfing buddy / work partner. Like any "social network" (quotations because this is not a concept that exactly tickles me) the value is in the connexions, like looking at a army company photo, if you had family in the last world war. This sort of thing drives interest. I;d say for older lost family, because there's likely less records available, and it's common enough to find yourself pieceing together a relative's life thrugh their surviving friends, which is obviously a market for this.
What i think is scary is the idea subscribers / users might actually rely on such a service 100%.
Or is it more scary to tell your customers, from whom you've not yet worked out how to ask for money, which presumably is essential, that maybe before they send in their most valued pictures that they should run a rigourour local backup regimen? Like they'd enjoy that!
Even more scary yet is the potential for this to be a bait and switch. First you upload your treasured family stuff, then the company, for whatever reason, runs out of money to "develop their business model" or changes control or management, and then they send you a bill to "upgrade" your service to keep your records intact, same time as sentient customers realise by that time there's not been enough reinvestment to actually place any kind of measurable guarantee as to the integrity of your data.
"Please send me the things you most care for, all your precious family stuff. Don't worry, i'll work out a way of making money out of you later!"
That's what i hear.
Meanwhile, optical "rusts", drive controllers fail, popular FSs do nothing to prevent corruption even on simple copy functions (NTFS, looking at you, but you're not alone) and consumer spec HDDs are doing duty cycles more like enterprise array components did a short while back, as machines get used increasingly 24/7 by family members, for streaming vids, for all the stuff many individuals rely on to keep their present social life intact, let alone their legacy family life preserved.
I'm not wholly against TechCrunch, it is useful to have all the startup hopefuls in one place for reference. But with the readership they have, and not even one cursory mention of the pitfalls which are well known to anyone professionally touched by the storage industry, is a travesty. Their advertising revenue is no - doubt robust as a consequence.
I keep reminding myself, that despite Google's history as a bait and switch (from "no advertising" to biggest ad agency in their economy) the most significant thing they've done is make the general public aware of the value in archive, in scanned works, out of copyright works, and even - allowing this is hugely contentious - in the value of capturing storing and promoting "abandoned" works, the value of which no-one likely knows. I've strong reservations as to Google's approach. But if you read William Patry, their counsel for copyright, you couldn't find a more lucid general, philosophical approach to why what they do is not against the spirit of copyright law. (which views i believe he held before he joined Google) . Oops, touching on a huge subject, but my private view is that because Google can do this, whether they effectively monetise it or not, they are alerting a vast cross-section of the population to the idea there's value in old works, scanning, digital preservation. Having run a "ancient work" preservation project more than a decade ago, which flunked as budget was really beyond a small outfit who had to turn income more directly, and the quality ambition was high even by current expectations, the thing which bugged me was the number of people who suggested the effort was futile, of no particular value. Now, of course, i get told how such projects are futile because Google will just do them, but there's more art to preservation than they are generally doing - they showed the mass route and network effects can be done. Some of the stuff i was involved in capturing simply isn't even in national libraries. Not bitter or anything, in fact just jealous i'd not been born a decade or two later to enjoy all of this when i was in education, thinking i'd not have dropped out had i been able to do so much research so readily i'd have quickly understood my interests the better :)
I've no idea as to why my longer comment above was modded down. Was merely a discussion as to real risks in data storage of emotional value, some bits personal, some technical in aspect.
I think it's fair to be skeptical of new companies offering long term services. I wasn't bashing the company who is subject of this discussion. I was merely saying that the scary bit is not just i you're an investor but possibly also as a customer. Anyone recently read a SEC filing of their bank / thrift / life policy company? My most important thought regards this discussion is that there are ways you can communicate the stability of your company to customers who wish to rely on it over long periods of time. One way i imagine not to do that well, is to point out you've no business model. That's not quite the same as a "caveat emptor" warning. In fact the lack of plan, or general presentation of te service, has obviously been taken to be altruistic by some observers who have commented here. No problem with that, it's a cool idea, but try it differently, would you buy archive length storage from me, even for good money, if i said i'd no idea how to break even? Or is it okay only if it's free, which presumably it cannot be later on? How would you make this break even?
I fairness, what company doesn't evolve their business model over time, espcially startups? Steve Blank is my hero on this issue, drumming home a whole theory which anyone who has been in a startup and up against it as opposed to burning hot money, knows at least close to half of it intuitively, but never got to write down or work out what they really knew. The most lethal argument i ever had with my co-founder was "but you need to do a busines splan" versus \"but it'll be out of date by the time i edit my awful prose". Since we were bootstrapped, i didn't feel we needed it for widow dressing . .I say it was lethal - it wasn't but it was a huge drag and a wasteful personal point of contention, made tricky because my co-founder had thirty years experience on me and i idolised him, just not when it came to that particular point :)
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.
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.
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...
" We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two." Consider the insane amount of people who are considered extremely influential in their respective fields/disciplines/arts only AFTER they pass away. I don't know if that is a trend that will continue into the future, but I certainly hope so.
If longevity come soon enough, than our contemporaries will be able to live extremely long lives.
However, if there is no modification to human memories, than the people that we remember today will continue to fade away into the distance.
The current generations that receive the longevity gift, will be able to make bigger imprint on an ever large scale as they age, provided that our brains are constantly learning and enhanced by ever more sophisticated cybernetic implants. To that extent, the lives of past people will surely be obscured out by the first generation of almost immortal human beings.
Replying here as i think grellas may have the insight as to this bother i see: namely i've read the Ts&Cs on their site, and i really don't think they're acceptable or helpful to any party.
The biggie for me is this:"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your specific memorial privacy settings you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with 1000Memories ("IP License")."
Now, i realize there's a kind of dependant clause there, citing "memorial privacy settings" but that sounds like a black - hole definition. No mention of living person profiles either, see below para. I'm not even sure the term is sufficiently well constructed as to be enforceable, but it really is not what i would do, to put high value family records at the licensing mercy of any third party. As it stands, i think someone thinks that because FB has lunatic terms, maybe they believe this is okay. But in the photo world, you normally see "grab" clauses like this in iffy photo comps and gutter microstock sites. I think it's wildly incompatible with the spirit of what the site purports to want to do.
Further terms bother me: "Administrator" is not defined. Again it's references to implied terms not real terms.
Then there's this snarly verbeage:
"If you create or administer a Memorial on 1000Memories, you agree that you have reasonable claim to be the administrator of the memorial and that you will not restrict the right of legal next of kin to assume administrative responsibilities."
So, what about families which are divided, say due to divorce? Would my putative step brother be allowed access to private photos of our common parent which were in fact private to my childhood? Also surely you warrant a claim, not agree a claim? I suppose i'd not be restricting the "legal right" of any next of kin if they had no rights, but does this indicate the website might arbitrate independantly?
There's a whole thing here which worries me, about how personal efects become property in trust for the estate, and are not necessarily divided or divisible nor disposable as assets by say an executor, if not disposed of by codicil, nor if they are common property are they controllable by an individual beneficiary. There are definitely times when however, if there is no commercial interest to be distributed, one or more members of a family may have rights to privacy, say for photos of their upbringing, and i wonder what kind of mess you could get into with this. Equally, who of the beneficiaries has any singular right to the moral copyrights and - i'm not sure this concept superannuates death exacty in a linear way - model release.
I actually find this sentence ofputting, in the context of the "grab clause" i've noted above: "We respect other people's rights, and expect you to do the same."
Then there's just something which gets my head hurting because it plain doesn't make any sense:
"You will not provide any false personal information on 1000Memories, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. You will not create more than one personal profile."
Which i simply don't get because i thought the idea is to ceate a profile for your dearly departed. I know this is cleared up by the later bit about creating memorial profiles, but you see i just find it confusing nonetheless.Mentioning this confusion because the Ts&Cs are i believe the single largest block of descriptive text on the site!
Surely none of this takes much fixing. Sure, a website like this needs rights to cover them in providing the service including copyright material, but they don't need open ended broad blanket licenses unrestricted as to use or purpose or intent. That could get fixed in 20 minutes.
I'm trying to reconstruct a comment which hit the bitbucket which addressed some market context i think may be constructively relevant...
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.
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.
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.
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! :-)
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!
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
Side note: the true losses i've experienced of family records were precipitated by ignorant relatives disposing of things they had no right to. My only ever data loss was also caused by carelesness or malice by a third party.
As a direct result of this i realy got into learning about everything from backup tape wear to filw system formats, data integrity. I suppose that might be a silver lining, certainly i am able to use what i learned most weeks for work.
But my real concern is how little people understand bit-rot and data integrity in general for storage. My view is nothing is yet truly archival quality. One of the things i learned was the way careful movie studios (used to?) separate their color originals into monochrome R,G,B reels, because the mono stock lasts so much longer, doesn't fade. Also i learned about Technicolor, which uses organic dyes which don't fade or hardly fade. But the original technicolor process is no longer used, apparently the last few lab setups were sold to China. I think China maybe got a good deal, and i wonder if we won't see it making a revival? That thought came courtesy of Andy Grove's recent interview where he observes that if we throw the "low tech" jobs away to other ambitious countries, eventually they innovate with it, like RCA / Westinghouse televisions and then Sony who then outsoruced to Korea who are the present hib of plasmas / lcds and so on.
What i mean is, don't outsource your family records and memories. Write stuff on paper.Print digital picstures on the best current Epson or Canon ink and put them in a dry dark place. Put a lock on it or put it under a attorney managed storage contract so your kids can get access but not throw it away in a fit of upset or stupidity.
As for this service, i admit i've not read much on their site, but where is the front and center discussion of how they've addressed the myriad ways data gets lost / corrupted?
I looked hard at trying to start a service similar to this, but not with the same angle. No way could i make the numbers work on a "freemium" model. Some website outfits do diligent archive style backup for pro photogs, and they charge very serious amounts of money, and i couldn't get any of those on record as to storage policies. It's not just having ZFS, but every app which touches your data better be doing checksums and more, and when i modelled my own idea, i had a 4 - tier multi redundant system that extensively used WORM tape for anything flagged "archive". The numbers got hard at the point the equipment his EOL or cumulative MTBF required preventative reinvestment. I was looking hard at trying to find insurance cover so that, should three data centers all fail, i could at least give some financial condolence to customers / cover lawsuits, but never got right at the kind of person who could quote me. I suppose that would be "cat risk" and i'd need a big "RE" not a front line insurer, but that was only part of my problem. If data is truly private - it might be of a marriage which went wrong and you only want those records to be available after a decent amount of time has passed - you need to build a fairly sensible, but necessarily complex, security model. Then there's the simpler fun of where to store keys, and how do you make any of this easy to use . .
I fear that projects like this risk more tears than they solve problems. The obituary thing is just a gimmick. What print paper runs an obit (for real,not a...
Digital systems pose their own problems, of course. There's media obsolescene (8-inch floppies, anyone?), digital integrity (bit drift, etc.), and media integrity (oops, that tape broke again). Much of what keeps archivists busy is deciding protocols for the continuous migration of images from one generation of media to another.
For really good up to date information on image permanence, I recommend the independent, non-profit (unlike Wilhelm) Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They've got some excellent, free downloads on both the basics and the advanced stuff. Wilhelm's book may be free, but it's very old and out of date. http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/
Oganic dye transfer has superb color stability over time. As one example, whilst Lucas was ruining the original Star Wars with a effective re-write, he relied on a private Technicolor print for the color timing. All the original negatives were faded.
You try to imply the stability is inherent in the mono master separations, but that was done for a lot of movies, with or without Technicolor printing.
The key masters in a Technicolor print are the "matrix" prints, which apply a screened dot pattern of the dyes to a recepticle emulsion which becomes the projection print.
By confusing all of this, you're missing the whole idea. You start talking about modern emulsion "technology marches on" and utterly ignore how bad was the emulsion of the time frame i referenced.
Also, you make an utter mess by saying this: "New viewing prints can be struck from properly stored master prints" which is just nonsense. The original master is out of the camera a negative. Then you rush print that with a transfer stock, against which you mark edits, and then you mark those edits back to the original reels, if you dare or more practically if you have someone sufficiently skilled at splicing the edits. There's a mere handful of people skilled enough to do that - one lady i recall, but not her name, waster her eyesight at the job, but worked on more majr flicks than i could list here if i found the reference.
So, you are wrong about this taking new prints from a master print. A print is a positive. There aren't even any positive - positive transfer stocks available currently in the Kodak catalogue that i'm aware of. The emulsion type was called "interpositive".
I've looked at your website you liked to, but have failed after several attempts to find any published papers, or any names which link back to any journal or conference proceedings.
Care to elucidate your points?
You are of course correct that Technicolor suffered due to cost issues, to the sheer mechanical alinment precision of transferring high resolution mechanical dot screens on small windows half the size of your 135 SLR / Leica "double frame" still camera. I imagine though we could engineer as good or better tolerances with much lower costs today.
Just to be absolutely pedantic, when you say "What made old Technicolor so stable was that it could produce silver separations of the three primary color records" you're really messing with the facts. Technicolor WAS a separation process, in the transfer stage, nothing like "it could produce", rather, it's design included that stage.
There's a diference between dye imbibation and dye chemical crystal formation. In short hand, most experienced technicians and cinematorgraphers i've met or read, use the word "dye process" to mean dye imbibation, not ineterlayer dye formation. Hunt's books are a wonderful intro to all aspects of color, get the earlier versions for review in case later revisions have remoed the chapters on color formation processes.
I note your organization IPI has been about a while, but where can i find your papers archive?
Your later comment, as to Wilhelm, which came across as snarky, rather ignores the fact that the man's main body of work is an excellent start to undertsnading. I don't read papers or books in isolation. If you can point out where their research is wrong, i'd certainly read with interest. But you just came across as if he was a self promoter johnny-come-lately, and even if he actually is, in the whole scheme of things, he's put out more work you can read directly than the site you've linked to or are associated with.
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.
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.
That would be a little scary to me as an investor.
I'm thinking there's comment management going on here. Why not engage me? But read me through either way, if you can stomach it. Rebuttal of any of my points should not be hard, i don't imagine what i've said in this discussion is so watertight that a good explanation of well turned out long considered goals, will not make the contrary point. I am curious as to why a downmodded critique of an possibly affiliated company would be good PR on. I don't take it that way though, nothing personal about my words as to my comments in discussion here or who has replied etc. Instead i think commenters here are missing a lot of history as to the market this new outfit is working in. I overlooked this is a Y-Comb startup. Maybe, i'm guessing, but i feel bad at the mere hint of suspicion that my genuine comment was suppressed or reasons of misunderstanding. No worries if i'm wrong.But i'm no bloody shill for a competitor. Maybe it's a new deadly sin or crippling vanity to wonder out loud in the fashion i imagine someone might be who is not utterly green in the world.If i'm brusque writing now it's because i feel insulted. Not slighted. Just if my outlier suspicion is even partially correct, i'm actually insulted there was no reply calling me out for being somehow wrong in a explicable way. If my language is not cool, tell me so, and you have my apologies, but i don;t think my concerns are wrong. It's not even a political position.
pg's comment above is absolutely bloody true: the reputation of the market dealing in memories and particularly photography is so murky as to be abhorrent. I don't think that's much argument though to ignore hat i was saying, so i'll try to explain my background thoughts here . .
This is all anecdotalism, but meant to hint at data you can find yourself from industry bodies, from trade journals and from not a few online discussions. I'm attempting a vignette, a bt of narrative, not thorughness or empiricism.
One side, you've got good photographers loosing wedding gigs to weekend "pros" who just bought a (now cheap, even for great stuff) DSLR, and on the other side Costco minilabs who'll call the cops on you under DMCA for trying to print any photo you take which is "too professional". (Ok, invest in an inkjet, but i'm no fan of the expense of running those, or gold dust expensive ink being "expired" on a fixed date or printer manufacturers keeping in systems which by design wste a 100 bucks of ink just to declog a head that oddly other companies manage not to clog in the first place and on and on ad nauseam).
My (not modded down, yet) comment above mentioned a true scandal - that the world's most respected imaging company dumped less than substandard stock on their most lucrative and high profile customers for more than a decade.
On a photography bent, the last pro level camera i bought, a Nikon D2X cost $5k and was a literal bleeding edge piece of kit. You really had to know what was up with your exposures, the "auto program" mode was a sure fire way to unviewable images. The very best cameras are only now approaching the ease of exposure of film, though they've worked wonders with quantum efficiency so unheard of hand - held shots are possible in almost no-light which stack up in a gallery if processed well. Those really good ones cost similar money, a bit more with the Yen where it is. For those of you who know their photogtaphy, the comparison i have is to print film (negative or "color reversal" stock, to be pedantic. I can put that in a 2 dollar camera and the lattitude means i get a usable shot, corrected in the print often as not, but i can concentrate on what i want to photograph.
This all may seem a digression, but photography was in serious business decline from 1988, the peak of the SLR system camera sales era, epitomised by Minolta, who that year lost their founder and their entire ethic and direction. Right now there's a renaissance, which is wonderful, so wonderful that the cost of technically good photography has become so low, that ...
A potentially good business model in the future could be to provide services such as taking piles of media from the family and compiling it into slideshows, videos, etc.
There is a ton of analog media that people want digitized. Offering this service to mourning families and creating a package that could be purchased by/for members of the family could be lucrative.
But for the service whch does obits, or for any other frankly, why not try to match normal people who get cited in the press to their death records?
This could easily be a moral quagmire. False matches of any kind could really mess you up if you pitched cold. But if someone goes online and actually registered their dearly beloved, how much would it take to offer an option to pull all reasonable matches, and have a deal to license press photos? My own father got himself to the point of a kind of positive notoriety in his hometown press, campaiging for things like public parks. But the local papers didn't pick up on their own archives, on his death, and so belatedly my Brother dug out some clippings and prodded a obit out of i forget which one of the locals. It could have been done much better, (naturally i'd say that, of course!) and frankly the public obit didn't count for much to us and i know Pop wouldn't have given a hoot, but it would have been neat to have gotten a layout with his mentions and citations as they were originally printed, for distant relatives, all from one place. Somewhere all those clippings are in the files, going back to the thirties. But i'd have hapily paid for them to be rolled up into a package, and probably been happy to pay for a good simple bound letter sized packet.
Hmm, i'd not want to do this if i were doing it for a fairly well known business person, maybe, too much guff gets written which is of no personal interest, but for anything civic, i think it would have a good vibe. Heck, if you were a real tactful charmer, you could look up the recently deceased cross referenced with local fire chiefs and counselors and maybe - because for these people at least, you could be sure as to a match - offer them as a retrospective. I think small town types would be into this kinda thing. If i had to market that i'd mailshot an offer to a cross-section of interesting types and offer freebies if they can link up clubs, veterans associations and the like and sen out so many for free to get word out. Sure, i'd painstakingly copy edit every last word and comma and run my style by a whole bunch of different age groups / demos before sending a single letter. But done right, it could wor well on word of mouth alone. PR is the thing for this, and given the current IT savvy of our senior generation, offline is a good bet as a place to start.
There's something funky in this whold idea though which gets me feeling odd: i really want to see "memorial pages" get screened for checking the person is actually dead.
So, in the name of protecting privacy, of having certainty no-one is at home to nasty pranks (i could imagine this kind of thing being used maliciously without adequate checks, just think Walter Matthau / Jack Lemmon in "Grumpy Old Men" for a a bit of humorous cruelty, heck what else am i going to do in my dotage but bug my buddies and dribble on my grandkids?) anyhoo, you have a model for modest charges right there, to run some basic integrity checks.
The whole problem with freemium is the first hurdle payment. Moreover that hurdle payment needs to be something which is not merely paying for something which was previously given away.
If you want to grow this slowly, but surely, find any connexions between a your obituaried deceased and other contemporaries, but i mean there has to be a way to ask nicely if anyone wants to do the same deal for their late business partner / golfing buddy / work partner. Like any "social network" (quotations because this is not a concept that exactly tickles me) the value is in the connexions, like looking at a army company photo, if you had family in the last world war. This sort of thing drives interest. I;d say for older lost family, because there's likely less records available, and it's common enough to find yourself pieceing together a relative's life thrugh their surviving friends, which is obviously a market for this.
I...
Or is it more scary to tell your customers, from whom you've not yet worked out how to ask for money, which presumably is essential, that maybe before they send in their most valued pictures that they should run a rigourour local backup regimen? Like they'd enjoy that!
Even more scary yet is the potential for this to be a bait and switch. First you upload your treasured family stuff, then the company, for whatever reason, runs out of money to "develop their business model" or changes control or management, and then they send you a bill to "upgrade" your service to keep your records intact, same time as sentient customers realise by that time there's not been enough reinvestment to actually place any kind of measurable guarantee as to the integrity of your data.
"Please send me the things you most care for, all your precious family stuff. Don't worry, i'll work out a way of making money out of you later!"
That's what i hear.
Meanwhile, optical "rusts", drive controllers fail, popular FSs do nothing to prevent corruption even on simple copy functions (NTFS, looking at you, but you're not alone) and consumer spec HDDs are doing duty cycles more like enterprise array components did a short while back, as machines get used increasingly 24/7 by family members, for streaming vids, for all the stuff many individuals rely on to keep their present social life intact, let alone their legacy family life preserved.
I'm not wholly against TechCrunch, it is useful to have all the startup hopefuls in one place for reference. But with the readership they have, and not even one cursory mention of the pitfalls which are well known to anyone professionally touched by the storage industry, is a travesty. Their advertising revenue is no - doubt robust as a consequence.
I keep reminding myself, that despite Google's history as a bait and switch (from "no advertising" to biggest ad agency in their economy) the most significant thing they've done is make the general public aware of the value in archive, in scanned works, out of copyright works, and even - allowing this is hugely contentious - in the value of capturing storing and promoting "abandoned" works, the value of which no-one likely knows. I've strong reservations as to Google's approach. But if you read William Patry, their counsel for copyright, you couldn't find a more lucid general, philosophical approach to why what they do is not against the spirit of copyright law. (which views i believe he held before he joined Google) . Oops, touching on a huge subject, but my private view is that because Google can do this, whether they effectively monetise it or not, they are alerting a vast cross-section of the population to the idea there's value in old works, scanning, digital preservation. Having run a "ancient work" preservation project more than a decade ago, which flunked as budget was really beyond a small outfit who had to turn income more directly, and the quality ambition was high even by current expectations, the thing which bugged me was the number of people who suggested the effort was futile, of no particular value. Now, of course, i get told how such projects are futile because Google will just do them, but there's more art to preservation than they are generally doing - they showed the mass route and network effects can be done. Some of the stuff i was involved in capturing simply isn't even in national libraries. Not bitter or anything, in fact just jealous i'd not been born a decade or two later to enjoy all of this when i was in education, thinking i'd not have dropped out had i been able to do so much research so readily i'd have quickly understood my interests the better :)
I think it's fair to be skeptical of new companies offering long term services. I wasn't bashing the company who is subject of this discussion. I was merely saying that the scary bit is not just i you're an investor but possibly also as a customer. Anyone recently read a SEC filing of their bank / thrift / life policy company? My most important thought regards this discussion is that there are ways you can communicate the stability of your company to customers who wish to rely on it over long periods of time. One way i imagine not to do that well, is to point out you've no business model. That's not quite the same as a "caveat emptor" warning. In fact the lack of plan, or general presentation of te service, has obviously been taken to be altruistic by some observers who have commented here. No problem with that, it's a cool idea, but try it differently, would you buy archive length storage from me, even for good money, if i said i'd no idea how to break even? Or is it okay only if it's free, which presumably it cannot be later on? How would you make this break even?
Great concept, good execution.
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.
On this page, there's an "unrendered" —
http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories
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...
However, if there is no modification to human memories, than the people that we remember today will continue to fade away into the distance.
The current generations that receive the longevity gift, will be able to make bigger imprint on an ever large scale as they age, provided that our brains are constantly learning and enhanced by ever more sophisticated cybernetic implants. To that extent, the lives of past people will surely be obscured out by the first generation of almost immortal human beings.
The biggie for me is this:"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your specific memorial privacy settings you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with 1000Memories ("IP License")."
Now, i realize there's a kind of dependant clause there, citing "memorial privacy settings" but that sounds like a black - hole definition. No mention of living person profiles either, see below para. I'm not even sure the term is sufficiently well constructed as to be enforceable, but it really is not what i would do, to put high value family records at the licensing mercy of any third party. As it stands, i think someone thinks that because FB has lunatic terms, maybe they believe this is okay. But in the photo world, you normally see "grab" clauses like this in iffy photo comps and gutter microstock sites. I think it's wildly incompatible with the spirit of what the site purports to want to do.
Further terms bother me: "Administrator" is not defined. Again it's references to implied terms not real terms.
Then there's this snarly verbeage:
"If you create or administer a Memorial on 1000Memories, you agree that you have reasonable claim to be the administrator of the memorial and that you will not restrict the right of legal next of kin to assume administrative responsibilities."
So, what about families which are divided, say due to divorce? Would my putative step brother be allowed access to private photos of our common parent which were in fact private to my childhood? Also surely you warrant a claim, not agree a claim? I suppose i'd not be restricting the "legal right" of any next of kin if they had no rights, but does this indicate the website might arbitrate independantly?
There's a whole thing here which worries me, about how personal efects become property in trust for the estate, and are not necessarily divided or divisible nor disposable as assets by say an executor, if not disposed of by codicil, nor if they are common property are they controllable by an individual beneficiary. There are definitely times when however, if there is no commercial interest to be distributed, one or more members of a family may have rights to privacy, say for photos of their upbringing, and i wonder what kind of mess you could get into with this. Equally, who of the beneficiaries has any singular right to the moral copyrights and - i'm not sure this concept superannuates death exacty in a linear way - model release.
I actually find this sentence ofputting, in the context of the "grab clause" i've noted above: "We respect other people's rights, and expect you to do the same."
Then there's just something which gets my head hurting because it plain doesn't make any sense:
"You will not provide any false personal information on 1000Memories, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. You will not create more than one personal profile."
Which i simply don't get because i thought the idea is to ceate a profile for your dearly departed. I know this is cleared up by the later bit about creating memorial profiles, but you see i just find it confusing nonetheless.Mentioning this confusion because the Ts&Cs are i believe the single largest block of descriptive text on the site!
Surely none of this takes much fixing. Sure, a website like this needs rights to cover them in providing the service including copyright material, but they don't need open ended broad blanket licenses unrestricted as to use or purpose or intent. That could get fixed in 20 minutes.
I'm trying to reconstruct a comment which hit the bitbucket which addressed some market context i think may be constructively relevant...
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.
I've been looking for a online community where the other users don't annoy me for quite a while.
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.