I like the approach to creating a new memorial experience. But consider this, do people really want to subscribe to a hosting space to do that? What about the huge blogging space out there readily available for use?

Thanks Zackle but you cannot do what i am suggesting on a blog, i am not suggesting for one moment to create yet another memorial space.

I am suggesting creating a radically new type of memorial experience, a 3D virtual world of living memories.

If you have seen those 3D galleries that allow you to place your photos into gallery frames, where you actually walk around the gallery and see your pictures on the walls. Well, if you have, take that experience and amplify that to another level, that is what i am suggesting. Let me try and paint a picture of a possible customised viewing memorial.

Imagine entering your Heavenly world that you have customised for you departed love ones. For example, imagine walking in a glade, on a summers evening, in a beautiful forest bathed in ethereal exotic hues, you can hear the sounds of the creatures and birds singing around you. As you walk leisurely through the glade, a dog comes up to greet you warmly, an actual picture and then a video clip of your departed mothers dog is displayed in a viewing screen that rolls down to the side. The dog accompanies you on your leisurely stroll wagging its tail and nudging you with its nose. The background music changes from a new age type of meditation backdrop to a favorite song your mother loved. As the music changes, you are led to a turn in the path and there is a woman that is sitting on a log with a golden light warming her face, you approach... you then hear a voice clip of your real mothers voice talking to you, the viewing screen now displays a moving slide show of your favorite pictures of your departed mother and you hear some voice overs of your voice saying some nice chosen words as each picture changes... then a video starts to play of a family Christmas celebration that was very special... and so on and so on, this is just one view you could compose... i hope that conveys a better picture of what i am trying to suggest.

As other members of your family or loved ones depart you can add them or link them into this virtual remembrance, you can change the media content as time goes by.

Heck, over time families could build a family tree of virtual memories... some people might even want to create their own memorials to leave to their families when they die as a loving departure gift, with special messages that will only be played once they have left!

Regarding money... i don't think this is an issue when it comes to these things in life, people pay to maintain a grave site and service it with flowers indefinitely. My thought is that the price of the service would not at all be exploitative... a small amount of money for the maintenance of living memories for a generation to come. However, one could also offer a DVD recording of your memorial for purchase after 12 months, for example, if you wanted to discontinue the subscription.

Through much experience of death in my life, i know how nice and rewarding it is to have pleasant memories replayed of people and animals i have loved. Once the grieving is over it is comforting to remember their lives in refreshed detail. I have done my own blogs for remembrance but they don't do what this could do.

I think it has a healing benefit for the customers as well as for the providers.

I'm not sure there is a need, but if there is, doing it in a "virtual space" is probably appropriate. Now I know the learning curve for Second Life is significant, but is it something done in SL or the environment (exploring not adding or updating) can be prototyped?

I mean building a 3D client and server technology is a daunting task. But if there is a VRML type pre-existing space we could occupy part of might make implementation (or market testing) an easier task.

Oh, and market testing would be icky. "My dad just died, I'd like to use your website to build a memorial, but I don't see a buy option."

"This is just a market test, would you like to put in a pre-order?"

"Bawwwwhhhhhh hhhhhuuuuuuuhhhhhh uuuuuuuuhhhhhhh!!! Dad's dead... he's DEAD!!! And all you have a pre-orders!!!"

(awkward)
-g

Thanks Gord... if you research google, the need is definitely there, 'Death Memorials' yields 20 million hits, 'Death Memorial web sites' yields 1.58 million... as an indicator... and as none of us escape the inevitable there will never be a shortage of supply.

The flaw in the market test philosophy highlights the difficulty your humour exudes. But i think we see good signs of this evaluation metric changing. So hopefully you don't have to kill the mother-in-law in order to sign up for an early beta subscription;)

But seriously, I want want to stress the healing aspect this site could provide too... one popular memorial website is http://www.memory-of.com, it currently hosts 39645 memorial sites at $49 per year each and 1,543,139 people visited and lit candles! It is a classy site and the testimonials will convince you how strong the need is for this type of website. Here is a portion of one that underlines what i am saying and there are thousands more:

"I have recently found your website and created two memorial sites. One for my wife and one for my mother. I have shown the site to many of my co-workers and they think is great and beautiful. They are going to create a site for their loved ones also.... It is helping me heal from the loss of my family. If there was an award to give you I would nominate you as the best site I have ever been to..."

There is also a market segment for fans building sites for their heroes, actors, actresses, pop stars etc etc.

Coming to the technology, i wasn't actually suggesting Second Life as the vehicle but as it is now open source then the option is now a viable one. However, this would only be viable in my view by abstracting the huge learning curve of SL... this market is not going to be keen to learn SL as it currently stands but now with the open source, one could now look at providing a very thin front end that just allows navigation through a virtual heavenly world of memories!

A land purchase, scenery and props build in SL could provide all the scenic and avatar object requirements and very cheaply compared to going it alone.

Another view i took was to rather providing very simple tools for customers to upload pictures, video segments, mp3 and narrations and choose environments. The website would then compose the tribute and the customer could just view it with some simple interactions like navigation and touching an object to bring it to life.

Another thought i had, was to provide an additional level of simplicity, whereby the website would shoot a Machinima movie of the tribute and make that available as a standard video experience and again SL provides those tools and there are free programs like FRAPS to do it too.

Layers could be built whereby customer access and viewing visits could be as simple as a Flash client on standard web pages... right down to an SL type experience and in between.

I think there is lots of scope to make this into a nice sized business with the big plus that customer retention is very high and customer continuity would be increased through inheritance wishes.

You're right, the SL learning curve is steep, I rethought about how much time it took me to go from installing SL, to actually getting onto BattleAxe Island (create avatar, skin avatar, etc).

Anyone know if the SL (open source) client could be re purposed to offer simple navigation through an existing SL space? Like bypass the character creation and "welcome spaces"? I'd expect those steps are mandatory and controlled by the server.

Other tangent: As a video editor, I know photo montages set to music can be pretty effective. Uploading photos and music and have site churn or stream such a montage would be very effective, although certainly existing photos sites (Flickr) would be way ahead of us on any such features.

Its hard to me to fathom the value of such a site because I don't think its something I'd use personally. Not that I represent the way most people thing about such a thing, just that its hard to brainstorm on what works and what doesn't since i'm not much of a "memorial" type person.

But here's other tangents that might be useful:
- Meet-up utilities (recently dead? to coordinate wake?).
- Grief counseling?
- MP3 comments you mentioned sounded interesting. I like the idea of audio tagging photos others have uploaded. So recalling stories can get fleshed out as everyone adds their own notes. Text is more practical but some people hate to type and audio is a bit more personal is some respects.
- Dating (look who's single!)