AllThingsD » death

Jerry Yang's Brush With Death (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:14:45 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

There Are Seven Billion People on Planet Earth Right Now (Try to Keep Up, Facebook!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:49:46 +0000

It’s official: Seven billion people are alive in the world at this moment, a high population point of all time.

Births are obviously outstripping deaths by a little more than two to one.

Here is a really cool site called Worldometers that has the countdown and all kinds of other cool stats, accounting for our little and now more crowded world.

The section on society and media is particularly terrific, showing how many cellphones are being sold, emails sent, tweets posted and, of course, blogs created. Like this one, blink and you will definitely miss it.

And note how much slower new book titles published and televisions sold are in comparison to digital stats.

Facebook, by the way, is now closing on one billion users, sources said — although the official number for the huge social networking site here is 800 million.

Viral Video: The Funniest Steve Jobs Spoof Ever

Kara Swisher — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:14:51 +0000

We all need to laugh a little after today’s sad news of the death of Apple co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs.

So here’s the hysterical spoof from “Saturday Night Live,” in which his comic double unveils the iPhone.

Very funny:

I-Postmortem Wants to Make Us All Virtually Immortal

Liz Gannes — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:01:27 +0000

All of us who use the Internet are going to die at some point, and it’s not yet established what we’ll do with our online presences and whether we’ll leave digital legacies. A new entrant to the online cemetery space launching at the DEMO conference today is I-Postmortem, which offers sites for not-dead-yet people to create a sort of time capsule of their last wishes and documents stored at a Swiss data warehouse (costing a hefty $120 per year!). What seems problematic about this approach is that start-ups often die much sooner than people.

Handling the Digital Death -- Or Not -- Of a Business

Liz Gannes — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:00:53 +0000

When I tried to take some newly arrived San Franciscans out to brunch this weekend, we were almost foiled. Little did I know that the restaurant I’d hoped to meet them at had permanently closed, and that Google had a weird, erroneous current listing for it with an address across town. When I arrived to see a notice on the door at the closed brunch spot, my friends called to say that they were turning onto Union Street — 20 minutes away. Oops!

Online acknowledgement of the death of a commercial establishment is perhaps not as touchy a subject as how the Web handles the death of a person — but it’s still pretty awkward.

The New York Times had a story this weekend on a different flavor of this problem: When enough users tag a Google Place listing as “closed,” Google believes them, so lots of people apparently abuse this crowdsourced privilege. The proprietors are most definitely not happy to learn that they’re “closed,” and that they’re presumably losing business from Google searchers. Apparently these pranks are less common on less-used Bing and Yahoo.

“In the last four days, I’ve hit that ‘not true’ button every six to eight hours,” said Daniel Navejas of RBI Divorce Lawyers of El Paso. “It’s getting old.”

In mid-August, a search consultant and blogger named Mike Blumenthal was so rankled by what he considered Google’s cavalier attitude to closings on Google that he committed an act of online disobedience: He “closed” Google’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. For a brief period, Google itself was “reportedly closed,” according to Places. “I did it to point out how annoying this is when it happens,” he said.

Google told the New York Times it’s working to prevent “malicious or incorrect labeling,” and that it has already started emailing business owners to alert them when users say they’ve closed.

Dead or fake dead, Google should probably be better at getting these things right. For today, my friends’ wild goose chase ended at another brunch spot across the street, whose openness I personally verified by walking over to check.

QOTD: Keep Calm and Carry on, Twitter!

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 18:42:33 +0000

In any case, I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don’t think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of “deaths” are self inflicted.

– A VC Fred Wilson, on the newest entrant into social networking game.

If You Die Tomorrow, Who Will Bury Your Data Six Feet Under?

Drake Martinet — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:12:11 +0000

Who will be reading your email after you die?

LifeEnsured, a New York-based start-up currently running on a $150,000 angel investment, is betting that you’d like to be the one to decide.

“We want people to think about about what their virtual life is and what it means to them and their families, and how they want to be perceived after they pass away,” said Founder Michael Aiello. “We want to be there to help take care of all that.”

Besides posthumously deleting an embarrassing Facebook account, what else could the recently departed want?

As it turns out, there’s quite a lot a user might want buttoned up online–and the services offered by LifeEnsured ranged from the straightforward to the fairly creepy.

Besides having Facebook accounts deleted, users can leave a final status message, disable wall postings, change their bio (theoretically to the past tense) and even transfer ownership of the account.

In fact, LifeEnsured members can take similar actions with over 30 online services like Twitter, PayPal, WordPress and Dropbox.

Some users will be particularly glad to know that the Match.com and eHarmony dating sites can also be dealt with, through LifeEnsured.

Aiello explained that there were also even more creative things that could be done with the departed’s data.

“One of our options for Yahoo’s Flickr photo service is to have all of the images revert to Creative Commons or into the public domain upon death of the owner,” he said.

LifeEnsured will also send any final emails, disperse the last files that users upload, or make a eternal XML/SOAP call to a personal Web server.

Why one might want to clear a Web server from beyond the grave is anyone’s guess.

Aiello’s choice to found this company is either a little dark, or just plain ahead of the curve.

After all, he is working on end-of-life planning, while most of his millennial entrepreneur brethren are trying to find ways to serve up more life-affirming services, such as daily deals and photo sharing apps.

But LifeEnsured is a start-up. And, if most start-ups fail, what happens if the customers outlive this one?

“We put all the requests for our paying members in irrevocable trust, paid for my their subscription fees,” Aiello said as comfortingly as a smooth-talking funeral director.

So, theoretically, if you are a paying customer, your wishes will be met, as long as the American legal system remains intact.

While LifeEnsured is operating in somewhat virgin territory, Aiello sees it as a necessary part of end-of-life planning for every generation from here on forward.

And that philosophy fits the sales strategy.

Aiello said that Life Ensured is “in talks with a major national funeral home chain to become part of the suite of services they offer when people come in to make arrangements.”

As macabre as it sounds, it’s pretty practical to have the brochure about last digital wishes, next to the one for choosing casket linings, or in the attorney’s office when filing a last will.

I caught up with Aiello at New York University’s Poly incubator in Manhattan and shot a solemn video with the digital undertaker.

Rest in your many digital pieces:

[ See post to watch video ]

How to Hoodwink Twitter (Hint: It's Easy)

Peter Kafka — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:00:46 +0000

How can you use Twitter to spread falsehoods? So easy! So many options! Here are three:

Make up a story about the death of a celebrity. Any celebrity.
Make up a story about Apple (AAPL). Any story.
Make up a story about Conan O’Brien and get the crowd at a Digg event to pass it along for you.

We saw the last one in action Saturday night at a South by Southwest event, when pranksters cooked up a stupid story about the unemployed talk show host, designed in part to promote a Web video studio.

This one didn’t get picked up by the mainstream press, but it did find plenty of takers for a while on Twitter.

CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, who happily participated in the hoax, describes it in great detail here. If you want the short version, here’s a video of the event’s genesis, provided by David Spark. Pretty simple stuff: Anyone can do it.

[Image credit: LiveFromAmsterdam]

SeaWorld Shuts Down Shamu's Twitter Feed After Trainer's Death

Marisa Taylor — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:00:02 +0000

Following the death of SeaWorld whale trainer Dawn Brancheau, the Twitter account of killer whale Shamu has been silenced.

Yes, Shamu has a Twitter account, and boasts more than 10,000 followers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A Bing Bug? If Not, How Did This Dude Beat Out Megan Fox and the Even Prettier Robert Pattinson for Most-Searched Celeb?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:25:39 +0000

Since Bing only debuted at mid-year (and launched at the D: All Things Digital conference too), BoomTown is willing to cut it some slack.

Until the Microsoft (MSFT) search service revealed on its blog last night that Perez Hilton–the irksome entertainment gossip blogger–beat out “Transformers” hottie Megan Fox and “Twilight” hottie-er Robert Pattinson for the top celebrity searched using Bing in 2009.

Clearly, its algorithm needs some tweaking by real people.

Bing is the first of the top search lists to come up for 2009, to be followed soon by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“If you’re curious how we determined the top searches, we analyzed billions of search queries and developed the list based on searches made with Bing,” wrote Bing GM Danielle Tiedt.

“Not surprisingly, we saw a lot of folks using Bing for quick access to favorite sites like Facebook, MSN, YouTube and Craigslist. We also saw a lot of more complex searches such as product related queries in which people used Bing to help decide what MP3 player to buy and travel searches to help find the best deals on a tropical vacation.”

But this time of year, it is mostly about the lists, so Bing noted that Michael Jackson–no surprise–was the top trending topic, followed in order by: Twitter, swine flu, stock market, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, Cash for Clunkers, Jon and Kate Gosselin, Billy Mays and Jaycee Dugard.

In other words, Bing users are celebrity death-obsessed, econalypse-worried, plague-wary people who cannot be without information about the worst married couple ever.

TMZ's Harvey Levin Speaks About Michael Jackson and More!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:51:29 +0000

On the spur of the moment yesterday–as Los Angeles was gridlocked by the memorial service for pop legend Michael Jackson–BoomTown decided to pay a quick visit to Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ.

Located on Sunset Boulevard–natch!–TMZ is the celebrity news Web site that actually broke the news of Jackson’s death, before any other media outlet.

And it has pretty much led the coverage as the sad story has unfolded–and continues to.

In fact, TMZ–which stands for the “30-mile zone” of Hollywood and also has a television show–is one of the great content sites on the Internet.

It uses a nice blend of text, video, audio and a laser focus on intense reporting on its topic to yield a whole new kind of media that is Web-born and -bred.

As I always note: Levin covers the tribulations of celebrities, like Britney Spears, as if they were the Iraq war.

TMZ, which will soon undergo a refresh of its design, is owned by Time Warner (TWX). It was launched in 2005 jointly by its Telepictures and AOL units.

Here’s a video interview I did with Levin about hubbub around Jackson yesterday and other topics, such as paying for tips and the convergence of online and offline (and, below it, is also a video tour of TMZ I did in late 2007, just after it launched its television show):

[ See post to watch video ]

Michael Jackson's Last Performance on the Web: Big, but Not Obama Big

Peter Kafka — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:07:38 +0000

Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

That sounds more like what I was thinking this morning: Everyone had to watch Obama’s inauguration or read about Jackson’s death, but not everyone felt compelled to see his burial or memorial.

It also explains why the Akamai people were so uncomfortable with my earlier reading of their traffic stats this afternoon, when I concluded that the events were responsible for the content delivery service recording more visitors per minute than any other time in the last year. Though I’d still love it if someone could explain why that did happen. (Jennifer? Anyone?)

Statistics are tumbling in from different sites and services (if you’d like to share yours with me, I’m all ears).

Here’s what I’ve got for now:

Akamai (AKAM) says it delivered 2,185,000 “live and on-demand streams” today. If I’m comparing apples to apples here (Jennifer?), that’s much fewer than the seven million simultaneous streams the content delivery network delivered during Obama’s inauguration. Akamai also compares the number of visitors on its “Net Usage Index for News” and says that number peaked at 3,924,370–that’s nearly double average traffic of 2,000,000, but fewer than the 4,247,971 visitors who were looking for Jackson info when he died on June 25.
Facebook, which integrated its service with live video feeds from CNN, E! ABC and MTV (why wasn’t Twitter doing this?), says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming through CNN. There were 1.8 million updates with the word “Obama” in them during the inauguration.
CNN says it served up 781,000 concurrent live streams during the event; during the Inauguration it served up 1.3 million. It served a total of 4.4 million streams during the event, and 10.4 million for the day.
MSNBC claims three million live streams–which are different from concurrent streams–and says that is its second-highest total, after…well you can guess. More if they roll in.

Jeff Goldblum Defies the Web, Denies His Death on "Colbert Report"

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:33:47 +0000

Jeff Goldblum has been making a string of appearances on “The Colbert Report” over the past few weeks, but last night was by far his best work. For starters, the Internet and Twitter declared him dead last Thursday.

The Colbert Report

Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

And here’s that stunning footage of a real Australian morning show reporting Goldblum’s death that Colbert used in his bit. Note that they had time to assemble a b-roll montage before going on air with this.

Bing Marketing Dollars at Work: Farewell, Michael Jackson

Kara Swisher — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:46:52 +0000

Where is Microsoft (MSFT) spending its $100 million in marketing for its new Bing search service?

Well, here’s a photo that was forwarded to me showing an advertisement on top of a taxi in Manhattan of a goodbye message from Bing, as well as GE (GE) entertainment unit NBC, to the late pop legend, Michael Jackson.

It was a joint effort from Bing and NBC, said a Microsoft source. The software giant and NBC have a strong partnership surrounding the launch the search service.

Done by Show Media, which specializes in this form of advertising, the text–with a picture from Jackson’s “Thriller” album–reads: “We will miss you Michael.”

Presumably, enough of a condolence to get fans to search about him on Bing–instead of on Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO)–and get news updates from NBC’s many media outlets.

Jackson’s sudden death last week caused a massive surge of activity all over the Web, including at search engines.

Here’s the taxi-topper image (click on it to make it larger):

Farrah Fawcett Also Remembered on the Web

Kara Swisher — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:22:30 +0000

While she had almost nothing to do with the Internet, the Web still has a lot to do with Farrah Fawcett, especially today after the iconic Hollywood actress and model died after a long and well-documented battle with cancer.

Still, the massive online reaction to a more sudden and unexpected celebrity death yesterday–pop legend Michael Jackson, who was 50–pretty much drowned out Fawcett’s passing at 62 years old.

That’s too bad, since she was a genuine cultural phenom–from her famous poster to her feathered hairstyle to her always glamorous declarations of “Freeze!” on the television show, “Charlie’s Angels.”

Thus, here’s my favorite of the many tributes to Fawcett from the Web, to remember her by:

Viral Video: Luke Russert Honors His Father

Kara Swisher — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:00:47 +0000

BoomTown likes to post online videos that are viral, or should be, and I could not be any more impressed with this one.

An excerpt from the eulogy that Luke Russert gave for his father–NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, who died suddenly of a heart attack recently–at a memorial service in Washington, D.C., a week ago, it is astonishing to see such poise given his young age (22) and under such tragic circumstances.

While all the controversy online erupted around when and how the elder Russert’s death was reported and about the huge amount of coverage, I think you will agree that this is well worth taking time to watch.

Here’s the video, taken from MSNBC: