I recently posted an article about a social network for Latino babies, and I thought that was weird enough. I mean, what are you gonna come up with next? Well, Tributes.com definitely tops the list of odd social networks. The intentions of Tributes is to take the obituaries from the newspaper to the internet.
Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com and Eons.com started the site when he noticed that the obituaries were the last piece of the newspaper that wasn’t really utilized on the web. His site gathers its information from the Social Security Administration’s Death Index database as well as information from funeral homes. Tributes already has dates for 84 million Americans, dating all the way back to the 1890’s
If you have a death in the family, you can use Tributes to give the deceased proper recognition, other than the small sentence normally allowed in the obituary section of the newspaper. An obituary up to 300 words will cost nothing, but larger than that can cost up to $80 annually or $300 for an unlimited period of time.
One of the most interesting features of the site is the ability to be notified when someone has died based on their last name, school, military unit or ZIP code. It sounds a bit disturbing, but it’s actually a fairly helpful service. They plan to also add a feature that will allow users to upload their address book to the site to keep track of passing friends and family. I actually don’t know if I want to sign up or not.
It does make sense to have a social community for the dead. I wonder if the site will have a notification service for bloggers that will let their various networks know when they have passed.
Now that would be a cool idea!