Footnote, a startup that launched at TC 50, wants you to have a social network of your dead. Yeah you heard it right, that’s precisely what the startup is up to.
Now since we are talking about dead people here, so naturally they wont be able to enjoy life streaming, or tweets or the likes, instead it would rather be a memorial sort of assembly. Users would be able to upload photos of their dead relatives, family and friends, share stories, and fill in a timeline for the dead relative.
In addition to this, you could build a graph by linking together different profiles, thereby letting others know how the two were related to each other. The site is not an empty graveyard to start with. It has populated itself with 80 million profiles that are fetched from the publicly available death records. It would be disturbing for you know, as indeed it was for some of the judges, that your dead relatives might already be on footnote.
The site also has a database of 43 million images of people, birth and death records, and newspapers which could be used to annotate profiles. On top of this the site adds 2 million new records to the site each month. The service also provides Flickr style tagging for photos.
On the monetization end, Footnote wants to make money by offering the 43 million images for a subscription fee for users to use in their profiles. This would make the site similar to getty images in this respect. According to them, the 43 million images that they have digitized are exclusive to them and hard to replicate by someone else.
With all that said, I for one will not buy the idea or even want someone to make a social network around my family and relatives. And even if we leave out this argument, niche social networks in their own right are a hard selling commodity, I am uncertain how and if the folks at Footnote would be able to sell their idea to living people to spend time creating profiles of the dead.
