1000Memories: A Loved One Has Passed Away. What’s Your Digital Strategy?

The biggie for me is this:"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your specific memorial privacy settings you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with 1000Memories ("IP License")."

Now, i realize there's a kind of dependant clause there, citing "memorial privacy settings" but that sounds like a black - hole definition. No mention of living person profiles either, see below para. I'm not even sure the term is sufficiently well constructed as to be enforceable, but it really is not what i would do, to put high value family records at the licensing mercy of any third party. As it stands, i think someone thinks that because FB has lunatic terms, maybe they believe this is okay. But in the photo world, you normally see "grab" clauses like this in iffy photo comps and gutter microstock sites. I think it's wildly incompatible with the spirit of what the site purports to want to do.

Further terms bother me: "Administrator" is not defined. Again it's references to implied terms not real terms.

Then there's this snarly verbeage:

"If you create or administer a Memorial on 1000Memories, you agree that you have reasonable claim to be the administrator of the memorial and that you will not restrict the right of legal next of kin to assume administrative responsibilities."

So, what about families which are divided, say due to divorce? Would my putative step brother be allowed access to private photos of our common parent which were in fact private to my childhood? Also surely you warrant a claim, not agree a claim? I suppose i'd not be restricting the "legal right" of any next of kin if they had no rights, but does this indicate the website might arbitrate independantly?

There's a whole thing here which worries me, about how personal efects become property in trust for the estate, and are not necessarily divided or divisible nor disposable as assets by say an executor, if not disposed of by codicil, nor if they are common property are they controllable by an individual beneficiary. There are definitely times when however, if there is no commercial interest to be distributed, one or more members of a family may have rights to privacy, say for photos of their upbringing, and i wonder what kind of mess you could get into with this. Equally, who of the beneficiaries has any singular right to the moral copyrights and - i'm not sure this concept superannuates death exacty in a linear way - model release.

I actually find this sentence ofputting, in the context of the "grab clause" i've noted above: "We respect other people's rights, and expect you to do the same."

Then there's just something which gets my head hurting because it plain doesn't make any sense:

"You will not provide any false personal information on 1000Memories, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission. You will not create more than one personal profile."

Which i simply don't get because i thought the idea is to ceate a profile for your dearly departed. I know this is cleared up by the later bit about creating memorial profiles, but you see i just find it confusing nonetheless.Mentioning this confusion because the Ts&Cs are i believe the single largest block of descriptive text on the site!

Surely none of this takes much fixing. Sure, a website like this needs rights to cover them in providing the service including copyright material, but they don't need open ended broad blanket licenses unrestricted as to use or purpose or intent. That could get fixed in 20 minutes.

I'm trying to reconstruct a comment which hit the bitbucket which addressed some market context i think may be constructively relevant, so i have nicer things to say, but i think there's no excuse to have such a mess of a terms of use page.

I'd much rather trust the long term hosting of my memories to a company that is around for the long haul like Wordpress or Google, or one of many other companies with products that aren't marketed for this purpose, but provide similar (actually a lot more) functionality.

But for the service whch does obits, or for any other frankly, why not try to match normal people who get cited in the press to their death records?

This could easily be a moral quagmire. False matches of any kind could really mess you up if you pitched cold. But if someone goes online and actually registered their dearly beloved, how much would it take to offer an option to pull all reasonable matches, and have a deal to license press photos? My own father got himself to the point of a kind of positive notoriety in his hometown press, campaiging for things like public parks. But the local papers didn't pick up on their own archives, on his death, and so belatedly my Brother dug out some clippings and prodded a obit out of i forget which one of the locals. It could have been done much better, (naturally i'd say that, of course!) and frankly the public obit didn't count for much to us and i know Pop wouldn't have given a hoot, but it would have been neat to have gotten a layout with his mentions and citations as they were originally printed, for distant relatives, all from one place. Somewhere all those clippings are in the files, going back to the thirties. But i'd have hapily paid for them to be rolled up into a package, and probably been happy to pay for a good simple bound letter sized packet.

Hmm, i'd not want to do this if i were doing it for a fairly well known business person, maybe, too much guff gets written which is of no personal interest, but for anything civic, i think it would have a good vibe. Heck, if you were a real tactful charmer, you could look up the recently deceased cross referenced with local fire chiefs and counselors and maybe - because for these people at least, you could be sure as to a match - offer them as a retrospective. I think small town types would be into this kinda thing. If i had to market that i'd mailshot an offer to a cross-section of interesting types and offer freebies if they can link up clubs, veterans associations and the like and sen out so many for free to get word out. Sure, i'd painstakingly copy edit every last word and comma and run my style by a whole bunch of different age groups / demos before sending a single letter. But done right, it could wor well on word of mouth alone. PR is the thing for this, and given the current IT savvy of our senior generation, offline is a good bet as a place to start.

There's something funky in this whold idea though which gets me feeling odd: i really want to see "memorial pages" get screened for checking the person is actually dead.

So, in the name of protecting privacy, of having certainty no-one is at home to nasty pranks (i could imagine this kind of thing being used maliciously without adequate checks, just think Walter Matthau / Jack Lemmon in "Grumpy Old Men" for a a bit of humorous cruelty, heck what else am i going to do in my dotage but bug my buddies and dribble on my grandkids?) anyhoo, you have a model for modest charges right there, to run some basic integrity checks.

The whole problem with freemium is the first hurdle payment. Moreover that hurdle payment needs to be something which is not merely paying for something which was previously given away.

If you want to grow this slowly, but surely, find any connexions between a your obituaried deceased and other contemporaries, but i mean there has to be a way to ask nicely if anyone wants to do the same deal for their late business partner / golfing buddy / work partner. Like any "social network" (quotations because this is not a concept that exactly tickles me) the value is in the connexions, like looking at a army company photo, if you had family in the last world war. This sort of thing drives interest. I;d say for older lost family, because there's likely less records available, and it's common enough to find yourself pieceing together a relative's life thrugh their surviving friends, which is obviously a market for this.

I genuinely think the demographic suits to print presentation, and you'd have to think hard about how to design that. There's an aesthetic you want to aim for for certain here, but i gotta dash before i could explain what i imagine would work. Somehow i think bright slideshow websites are not fully respectful - the idea that older relatives might have difficulty accessing them is potentially upsetting. I know my elderly family members roll their eyes at websites if they're expected to read something serious (though functional sites like travel booking get used without a hitch, i'm making the point about how subtle the "UI" has to be.

There's lots of aspects to printing which could be tweaked to make people want to pay, even if you made a free PDF version available.

The post i lost to the bitbucket somehow was a long moan and much detail as to print tech and print service economy supporting hosting sites. I'll try to come back and write that again.

But really, i think this current setup with 1000Memories just fails to seep class, let alone ooze it from every pore. I guess it's not surprising, if i guess right as to the developer demographic who've launched this. They need to get down their nearest old folks home and start doing some leg-work! :-)

Oops, forgot about the digitisation thing. I think the labor problem here is not so much digitsation, but handling and layout, and the quality you aim for. Co-ordination is also something which could be hard. Think pre-paid mailers and a fairly long lead time to collect everything first as relatives rummage. Those better be insured packages too, ou don't know what irreplaceable things you might be sent. Just a simple thing about scanning old photos, time to time i've printed scans on heavy card stock with a 1400dpi (real dpi, not interpolated) laser, and wow does that impress, and your print shine in a way readability is a different world even for young eyes. See my drift again, about tailoring to a maket demos?

Must go, this is proving to be a much more interesting take and i'm enjoying how far my thoughts have wandered away from my commercial analysis of more general photo hosting / print service of a few years ago.

best to all!

p.s. an iPad app is a must. Doesn't the iPad suddenly look a bit like a tombstone come tio think of it? :-)