The next (not so) big thing (and email from the dead)

So, for whatever reason, I was lying on the couch, trying to imagine what the next big internet thing could be. In the last few years services tied to cheap storage on a massive scale (and more recently tagging and the like) have been on the rise -- chock full of your mail and photos and keeping you in contact with your friends and hosting your blog and yada etc yada.

Now, if I had even the foggiest idea what the next big hardware breakthrough would be I might not be writing this right now.

But one thing that could be nifty is a service that would offer "person-alerts", like Google does with the news. Some grand clearing-house attached to Friendster and MySpace and tribe and the rest where you could enter in the details for your lost people and specify a matching threshold and get notified when someone who matched appeared. Hey, what about "Stalkr!" for a name? (Sure sure, people could opt out at the site or it could be part of the user agreement with the networking site or whatever. You say "privacy" and I say, just this once, very softly, "details.")

Okay, catchy name aside, it seems a little skeletal so far as internet ventures go. But then I remembered an idea I had way back when -- Email from the Dead.

"Finally, the last in last words." The premise is the obvious. You sign up with the service and write up your missives to be fired off at the appropriate people when the trigger event (your death) occurs. Why not tie it in to the whole "Stalkr!" thing, so that you can say goodbye, or perhaps piss-off, or, hey, I turned out just fine and then I died, to that first boy/girl/couple who broke your heart, but who you never managed to google and were too cheap to hire a PI to track down. Or, you know, you were just chicken.

The real beauty begins to appear when you imagine the accidents. Because they're going to happen. You won't be there to review the information and say, yeah, that's him/her/them.

So, imagine the accidents are the point. You create a recipient profile, write what you want to say, and then people ten and twenty and twenty-two and 33.3 years (and further) later get this weird message.

But I don't think "Stalkr!" quite works. "Hauntr!"?