Show HN: send letters from beyond the grave

by PedroCandeias • 15 years ago

3 3 15 years ago

5am. Slowly, I woke up. There was an idea in my head. The room was dark, even though the shutters were open. Dawn wouldn't break for another hour. I crept out of bed, out of the warmth of Her presence, and tentatively stepped away. My idea needed to be made manifest quickly, lest it be forgotten. Treading lightly on the cold wooden floor, I made my way to the living room, sat on a couch by the window and picked up the laptop.

As dawn came, the preliminary work was done. It was nothing but a sketch made of computer code, but it was enough. My idea had taken root. As I went back to the bedroom, my thoughts traveled a year into the past. In that same house my grandmother still dwelt. In another city, one of my dearest friends still lived. How could we possibly have known.

Less than a week has passed since that chilly Saturday morning. Work has progressed swiftly. I just uploaded a little website, in fact, and created an account for myself in it. Every once in a while, a program will run on its server and send me an email. I'll click a link in it and nothing will happen. One day, though, I won't click on that link. I don't know when or why. Surely it'll be in the distant future. But it will come. And when it does, another little program will take the letters I've stored in its database and send them one by one.

And hopefully the people I love will find some comfort in them.

mistrQ• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what to think of this.

I can appreciate why you think this is a problem that needs to be solved. But I can't help feel a bit wrong about it.

From a technical standpoint also, I feel it is heavily flawed: So I write some sentimental notes, forget to check in one day or change my email address or some other very trivial reason not to get the notifications and boom, it thinks I'm dead and sends out messages that should not yet surface.

I think it's one of these things that is a 'good idea', but should never actually be followed through.

PedroCandeias2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

I know what you mean. It's not quite what you'd expect from a web product these days. I actually had doubts about making this available to the public, at first. It was just a tool I wanted for myself, and a grim one at that.

Still, when it was done, there was no reason to keep it locked away. You never know. Writing all the copy took me longer than the actual coding, but I saw it as good training.

Anyway, this doesn't have to be as grim as the title suggests. It can be simply a kind of insurance: if you go on a trip and get lost, for instance, this thing can shoot important information to friends and family that helps bring you back. I could see this being relevant to people who live alone and travel a lot.

On the technical side, yes, the email warning system is weak by itself. That's why my first order of business was having it check your twitter feed. I just uploaded the feature.

In the future, it'll also check your facebook and foursquare activity. And send SMSes if you get really close to the timeout. Between social media monitoring, email and sms, it should actually be quite reliable at knowing whether or not you've disappeared.

Show HN: send letters from beyond the grave

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