Time to tweet good bye

Yesterday I heard about a new media tool: Webwill. A Swedish design student has invented it and is developing it for her diploma. On first sight it is only an online testament – a webspace where you can save your last will or last words. But webwill can do more, or better it is planned to do more when it’s released. Webwill has access to all your online identities like your Facebook-, studiVZ-, MySpace- and/or Twitter-account. So, when you die offline, it changes your online status, too, or simply deletes your online identities. It is also planned that webwill saves your last words and automatically send them to your online contacts. A message from the grave – if you want so. What a nice idea. Creepy, but nice.

I mean: Everytime a friend or beloved person dies, you wonder what he would have liked to say to you if he had known he would die. “The last words” are some kind of a precious good that wants to be spread.

Okay, I have to say that my first thought about webwill was: How impersonal, how cruel! A friend dies and all you get is a PM?! But then I thought that nowadays the main way of communicating is the web. Some friends talk to you mostly via internet, so it seems to be not that impersonal anymore. And then I remembered how my grand aunt died and all we got was an email from my uncle. We weren’t really close, but still we were really pissed off back then. But today even our whole family communication runs via mail. Today we have to say: Good that we got the notice of her death at all.

Another point that accured to me is the deathless character of our internet identity. Diing offline has no influence on our online-ego. We still exist there unless anyone of our relatives has access to our account and deletes it. We have so many online contacts, sometimes from all overthe planet. Don’t they all deserve to gat a notice of our death? That’s only possible via internet.
Death is in some way the most exciting thing of life. People tell others every day what uninteresting stuff they are doing on Twitter.com. So when we come to the exciting point – THAT would be worth a tweet, right?! A tweet from the after life. Great!

Probably this concept is nothing for everyone, but me personally I like the idea. I like the idea to have the possibility to say “good-bye” to the world. I guess it would give me the feeling of having a little bit of influence on my death. Also, it takes away the pressure of saying something really incredible and great and thoughtfull in my very last moment. It makes it easier, because I know I’ve said everything before.

But what would my last words be? Probably it will be as simple as this... ;)