Life after death goes online

December 3, 2010 Last updated at 15: 39 GMT by Dave Lee, BBC World Service the machine Timecard save a Flickr account to keep safe for many years, that the death of a close relative, the elderly often can mean a gloomy weekend or two going through old things, sorting through photos, donating old clothes to charity.

But in an age when so much of our lives online, little thought was given to how to handle digital world of a person when they are no longer with us.

By the time that the "generation Facebook" become old and grey, throughout their lives can be poured with a million updates on Twitter, thousands of photos on Flickr, hours and hours of videos on YouTube and maybe your website too.

As a person dies, their online presence should terminate too? What happens to personal information in all this?

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the main story In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it. "

End quote Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research Richard banks believes he may have the solution. He is an interaction designer for Microsoft and his team, based in Cambridge, worked on the concept of digital memories-and how, even if a person is no longer with us, their digital car can still be enjoyed.

He told BBC Radio 4 's all in the mind as the death of his grandfather, a few years ago I was thinking about the future of mourning.

"After his death, became the recipient of a suitcase full of photos of his life.

"Inside there was about 200 shots of different periods of his life, all the old analog photos, printed, stored away in envelopes.

"Got me thinking about what would be the difference, now with my photographic practices and the type of things that I could leave for my children."

He created several devices that run independently from any computer or other internet device acts as a traditional box of images and memories.

Rather than physical photos, however, displays the images of this device via an interactive touchscreen.

"If you touch one of those photos at any time, so I am taken to a timeline," explained Mr Banks.

"What is then a whole series of photos spread over time.

"Suddenly is a way of thinking we can begin to exploit the digital quality of some of these content, so that we can begin to make the objects that represent perhaps the life of a person, or perhaps give a sense of their evolution over time, or where they spent time at different points in their lives."

Mr banks hopes that its devices would mean digital memories would be far outlive the technology that were created on-as the old photographs in case of his grandfather.

The cloud

This task is made easier by our increasing dependence on "the cloud" for hosting our information-instead of physical storage such as floppy disks, hard drives.

The boxes are designed to function independently, so don't rely on keeping some hardware

"I think we tend to think of the physical limitations of digital things through objects like floppy disks, DVDs and CDs that we have stored our content on.

"I believe that some of these physical limitations are going to go away as we begin to store more and more content online. We'll put them in places and they will pretty much just stay there ".

This, however, is another matter. There are simply too much data? If these systems Save every utterance, the suitcase of 200 valuable images could become suddenly a huge collection of useless data.

"I think that sense of overwhelming numbers and quantity of content is more difficult to manage," says Mr. Banks.

"I think there are ways to tackle that computationally-always a sense of when the photos were taken or that might be the photo and those kinds of things."

Secrets beyond the Tomb

Our online personas can offer a look Back at life people Candido of giving glimpses into the personality and friendships. But with it comes a risk sharing too.

Abigail Sellen is also part of the team working on the project. She says that we can, while we're still alive, we must consider what might be left behind when we pass away.

"A lot of those materials can be quite sensitive or personal information.

Continue reading the main story exploring the limits and potential of the human is broadcast on mindIt Tuesday to 2100GMT and repeated on Wednesday 1630GMT to "So if you leave all that behind someone who interests you, is that the person will be comfortable going through them all?"

MS Sellen says that finding secrets left behind from a deceased relative is nothing new, but it could be interpreted in the archives of e-mail and other information.

"In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it.

"At least in this case, you know that they have kept them for a reason, and maybe it was important to them."

In future, it might be that how we write our will and perhaps even burn our secret letters, we may have to also spend time cleaning our lives online, ready to be put on display in those closest to us.