If I’m having this much problems managing my multiple digital presences now, try to imagine what could happen if for example I suddenly croaked.

In my article and its social media expert Adele McAlear, explains that the tangle of digital detritus we leave behind can have far reaching consequences on the lives of our loved ones, friends and even businesses we’re affiliated with.

“You’re Facebook page lives on long after you’re dead and unless arrangements are made other social sites won’t close your account either,†she said.

Conversely, if you haven’t left your account passwords to anyone it would be extremely difficult to open up those accounts.

Imagine if you had a Website that is earning money through ad placements, manuscript or book sales, online donations. Rather than help your family through financial difficulties those funds could be barred from them. Worst if someone else got hold of the password or hacked the system, they could siphon off the money.

What if you were blogging or talking to online communities to promote a company through a social site? If you die and no one in the organization has the password to the site, the company won’t be able to moderate discussion or filter out damaging posts.

Here’s where you need your porn buddy. You’ve got accounts to not so family friendly sites which if ever dug up could bring some embarrassing moments to your loved ones of business colleagues. 

Here are a few things to consider when preparing for your digital demise:

1)     Determine what it is you want to pass on or get rid of

2)     Designate a key person who will be left with account passwords and instructions. This could be a digital executor working under your lawyer, a friend working with your family or a buddy known only to you.

3)     Consider money in and money out issues. These are sites that are earning you money or sites that you owe money.

4)     Explain to your family your wishes. What may be important for you might be hard to understand for them.

5)     Understand the death policies of your social media provider and make arrangements with them early on.

Here are some sites that can help you managed your affairs. They have free and paid services:

Happy Quit Facebook Day. 

Think of the endless invitation to Mafia Wars or pleas to search for a missing cow on Farmville, not the constant updates from friends who just have to tell the world that they “just can’t wait for Friday†or that a “Sausage, eggs and mee goreng and a cup of Nescafe Gold†really perked them up today. All that could come to an end.

 

Last time I checked the , which officially starts today has only signed up 26,977 committed Facebook quitters out of the social networking site’s 400 million members. So good luck with that.

However, writer Steven Vaughan-Nichols has come up with a list of seven alternative sites that you might what to check out. We have his list here but you can also read the

WikiHow also has this step-by-step advice on Facebook-weary on how to kick the habbit – .

 

Here’s Steve’s list:

While this open-source project is still in beta, it’s an interesting take on social networking. Instead of being under the control of one company and one set of administrators, Appleseed works via a distributed server software package tied together with the ASN (Appleseed Social Network).

That means that as a user, you select and log into an Appleseed site. Once there, you connect with friends, send messages, share photos and videos, join discussions and participate in all the usual social networking stuff. Don’t like the specific Appleseed site you’re on? Then sign up for a different one and, according to the site, “immediately reconnect with everyone in your network.”

Diaspora, for all the headlines it’s gotten, is still not much more than an idea.

Technically, Diaspora sounds a lot like Appleseed. It’s also going to be built from open-source software, and it’s going to be a distributed network server application. The first Diaspora code release is slated for September.

Rather than being a social network, Elgg is designed for companies and groups to run their own social networks.

You can either run your own Elgg installation — according to the Web site, the developers will be happy to help you — or you can host your site with a provider that specializes in Elgg sites. Starting later this summer, you’ll also be able to host it on Elgg.com itself.

While businesses and social groups may find Elgg interesting, it’s not really a Facebook competitor in and of itself.

Lorea describes itself as “a project to create secure social cybernetic systems, in which human networks will become simultaneously represented on a virtual shared world.” It’s an experimental social network that combines some aspects of social networking, such as communities and real-time updating a la Twitter, with blogging.

Lorea may be less a Facebook competitor than a site for programmers who want to explore the fundamental concepts of how social networks should work.

Unlike Appleseed and Diaspora, the Vodafone Group’s OneSocialWeb is not only hoping to become a social network itself, but also to be the focal point for all the other social networks you may belong to.

For example, if OneSocialWeb works as planned, it will provide the common infrastructure from which you can access all your friends’ information, photos, comments, etc., from Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Of course, for this to work, the other social networks would have to agree to play by OneSocialWeb’s rules — and I suspect they won’t want to make it easy for users to jump from their own network to another.

Look for a public OneSocialWeb beta later this summer.

Like Elgg, Pligg is an open-source platform for building social networks. The key difference between the two is that Pligg is also a content management system.

Specifically, Pligg is a CMS that enables users to submit and vote on news articles, like Digg. Besides the usual up-or-down voting system, Pligg offers a chance to rate the articles using a five-star scale. While more than good enough for this kind of story-sharing, Pligg really isn’t going to be the basis of a Facebook-type network.

Here’s the good news: Pip.io is already up and running, and it is a real would-be Facebook competitor. Here’s the bad news: It is still very rough.

For instance, when Steve  asked it to find members of Pip.io whom he already knew by using his Gmail contact list, it instead offered to let him invite everyone on his thousand-plus address book to join him on Pip.io.

The interface, which owes more to Twitter than to Facebook, is easy to use. It also enables you to use other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter from Pip.io. In short, Pip.io is trying to be both a social network and a social network client.

It may, eventually, do quite well at all these jobs. But for now, it’s a work in progress.

-It’s the least we can expect for our billion-dollar investment

It’s hard to imagine governments acting in citizens’ social media privacy best interests when they themselves often seem so inept in terms of integrating social media within their own respective environments. For every example of a government department success story using social media tools and principles, there always seems to be a counter-example that illustrates just how many elected leaders and civil servants still have their heads in the sand when it comes to Web 2.0 and beyond. All-staff Twitter bans and continued sequestering of data that could help the public in hierarchical and disconnected silos, anyone?

Despite our leaders’ difficulties in making social media the new normal for government-citizen interaction, the need for our elected officials to help facilitate the transition to a Web 2.0-based economy has never been greater.

 

Facebook, for example, has garnered more than its fair share of headlines over the past couple of years for its propensity to play fast and loose with the rules of privacy and confidentiality. To its credit, the Privacy Commissioner’s Office has stepped in and forced Facebook to up the level of its privacy game – a process that has set a global precedent and positioned Canada as a leader in understanding and implementing real-world online privacy/confidentiality standards.

But this is only one example among a pretty desolate landscape. There are precious few other examples of governments – Canadian or foreign – taking truly bold steps to force market-dominant companies like Facebook and Google to play nice when it comes to citizens’ private data. For the billion-plus dollars we’re “investing” in the G8 and G20 summits, it would be nice if we at least got some answers on how member governments – especially our own – intend to not only meet the challenge, but get and stay ahead of the rapidly advancing curve.

If governments at all levels fail to exercise at least some influence over the evolution of privacy standards in the Web 2.0 and post-Web 2.0 era, it’ll be left to profit-seeking ventures to determine what’s fair and appropriate for the rest of us. Enterprise leaders and consumers alike are right to shudder at the prospect of Mark Zuckerberg holding the keys to the privacy kingdom. If anything comes out of these meetings, it’ll be consensus on how to keep tech giants honest – and citizens protected. 

is an independent technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ontario. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.