Twitter is one of those services that users love and the general public just doesn’t understand. Now a startup will enable you to tweet from the grave. The LivesOn service is being developed by a British ad agency called Lean Mean Fighting Machine. They setup a new twitter account with your existing twitter handle and add a “_liveson” at the end. For my twitter handle is ekiledjian and my LivesOn ID would be ekiledjian_livesone.

The system is in closed limited beta and is still in active development but the company claims it will learn about the user (while alive of course) by studying tweet patterns, writing style, preferred content, re-tweet strategy ,etc. In will then allow you to follow it (only you) while you are alive so it can collect your feedback and fine-tune its engine. Once you pass away, a designated person will notify LivesOn that you have passed and will authorize them to “public” your LivesOn account.

The company has partnered with Queen Mary University (London) to develop and fine tune the Artificial Intelligence engine. Interestingly the team isn’t working on monetizing the service just yet. The company claims to have 7000 registed users worldwide

But this type of service opens up a whole bunch of questions around monetization and death: 

• Is there really a market for this type of service or will it only be used by hardcore twitter fans?
• How will grieving family members feel about “something” tweeting in the name of their departed loved one?
• Will this type of service help or hinder the grieving process?