Homeless in Vancouver: Facebook may not die, but guess who will?

Death comes to us all, but wouldn’t you know it, Facebook accounts can live forever.

The social media network’s success has transformed lives and the longer it lasts, the more it’s changing how people are seen after they die.

First off, rumors of Facebook’s impending death have been greatly exaggerated.

The social-media pacesetter has just turned 10 years old and there’s no reason why it can’t last another 10 years or 50.

Its apps-based structure allows it to be whatever people want it to be.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Facebook is like a box of chocolates.”

Apps are the chocolates and Facebook is the box. You may not enjoy all the chocolates but you’re sure to like some of them a lot.

And Facebook is always adding new ones. Either third-party developers make them or Facebook reaches into its deep pockets and buys them, unless Twitter gets to them first.

So Facebook isn’t dying anytime soon, it has over a billion users after all.

But guess what, the people who use Facebook are dying every day—by the hundreds and thousands.

Facebook accounts take on a life of their own

In 2009 Facebook introduced the ability to memorialize accounts as a way for people to save and share their memories of “those who’ve passed.”

Accounts can be memorialized at the request of a close friend or family member.

Facebook removes sensitive information such as contact status and memorialized accounts are largely read-only. No one can log into the account but people can leave their remembrances.

Putting more life back into dead users' accounts

In a February 21 blog post, Remembering Our Loved Ones, Facebook announced significant changes to how memorialized accounts would be handled.

Most significantly, Facebook will now leave a account’s privacy settings alone—leaving them as a user had set them before death.

Previously the social network automatically increased the privacy on dead users’ accounts to the highest “friends-only” setting.

Facebook also announced that others will be able to view the deceased user’s Look Back video, an automatic compilation highlighting a user’s Facebook activity that was introduced at the beginning of February to coincide with Facebook’s 10th anniversary.

So that’s how Facebook handles the death of a user. That’s something to think about, but that’s not all—there’s more.

When dead Facebook users outnumber the living

The website What If’s Randall Munroe has written a thought-provoking post suggesting that if Facebook lasts long enough, it is inevitable that dead people with accounts will outnumber the living.

In a post entitled Facebook of the Dead he estimates to date some 20 million people who created Facebook accounts have died. He then looks at the long-term life of Facebook toward a possible date when there would be more dead people with accounts than living people on the social network.

He comes up with two possible time frames: the 2060s or the 2130s.

It depends on how long Facebook can keep increasing the number of new users. The dead kind of pile up after a while; sooner or later, says Munroe, they have to win.

So weird. Does that also mean it’s inevitable that more people will “Like” us after we’re dead?