Comments on: In the Event of My Death

By: Andy Polaine

Andy Polaine — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:59:10 +0000

Hi Nathan - thanks (and kudos) for replying to my post. I'm certainly
very interested to see where you guys are going with Entrustet. I know
from even just thinking about this in some detail myself that there
are plenty of difficult questions, some of which don't have any really
satisfactory answers. In the end, you have to trust someone with your
details because unlike 1Password or Backblaze, who can afford to have
a set-ups to which they never know your password and if you lose it,
you lose your data, death obviously means forgetting your password.

I think there are different levels of trust (bank details versus my
Twitter account), of course, but I find it interesting what the
emotional responses are. I regularly give third-party apps access to
Open Auth for my Twitter or Flickr accounts, for example. I also have
an iPhone app for my bank account. I'm sure your brand will grow in
trust over time, but it's an interesting service design question of
how you show that.

By: Nathan Lustig

Nathan Lustig — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:15:20 +0000

Andy,

Great post and thanks for the review of Entrustet. My family created digital photo/recipe books for the holidays this year and everyone enjoyed looking back at old pictures and reminiscing.

We know we are a new company and that we will have to earn your trust. Even if you are not ready to trust us with your usernames and passwords, it is still a good idea to use Entrustet to create a list of all of your digital property and make last wishes for each of them. Just having a list with your wishes makes your survivors job much easier. I wrote a blog post about this the other day: http://blog.entrustet.com/2010/04/13/entrustet-...

We'd love to hear more feedback as you explore Entrustet, so feel free to let us know what you think!

Thanks,

Nathan Lustig
cofounder, Entrustet.com

By: Andy Polaine

Andy Polaine — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:58:51 +0000

It's interesting isn't it? The more we feel that our memories are
becoming ephemeral, the more chance there is that our lives will live
on in the caches of Google and Flickr.

One of the ex-Bauhaus Weimar students, Anke Heelmann, runs a fantastic
project (it started as her Diplomarbeit) called Fotothek in which she collects old photo albums found at flea
markets and similar. She then categorises them for people to browse
through.

By: Karin

Karin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:36:14 +0000

Funny that you should be thinking about similar things I have these days, even though my thoughts run more on a philosophical path: thinking about the emotions attached to personal pictures and the emotions they carry, about the fleetingness of time and the fact that those emotions or at least the stories and secrets that are contained within are doomed to vanish with us…as are our lifestyles and idiosyncrasies. looking at those boxes of pictures from my parents now very distant past, their parents and grandparents, I realise how these pictures' meanings keep disappearing continously over the generations. still, we keep producing and collecting (more and more) pictures that have a meaning for us, hoping they will find people who will enjoy looking at them and maybe even find meaning and/or identity within them. of course, the same goes for writing…- recommended reading on the inevitable side-effects of the passage of time: John Updike.