New Service Notifies Your Online Buddies and Colleagues in Case of Your Death, Disappearance, or Other Disaster   - 888 Views,

The brainchild of Mike ‘Zugg’ Porter and his wife, Chiara, the idea for the service came about when an online friend of theirs - someone who actively participated in the forums for their primary company, Zuggsoft.com, but whom they knew only online, suddenly disappeared. At that point they realized they had no idea how to reach this person in ‘real life’, or who he even really was, so no way to contact anybody to find out if he was ok.

As it turned out, he was ok, but, as they tell it, “it caused us to wonder who would notify our online friends in case the worst happened to us. The SlightlyMorbid service was designed to meet this need for ourselves and all of our other friends.”

The way the Slightly Morbid system works is fairly simple. You create an account at the Slightly Morbid site, and in that account you store all of the email addresses of people whom you’d like to have notified in case of, well, any serious event in your life for which you’d like to have them notified.

Then you create a “trusted contact” account, which is a unique username and password for the person to whom you want to give authority to send out the notices. So, for example, your mom, or your spouse (or both). Explains the site, “a ‘Trusted Contact’ is somebody you designate who is given a unique username and password and who can login to this site to send an email message to your list of Friends.”

In the event that your friends need to be notified that something has happened to you, your Trusted Contact logs into the site, and sends a note. The note goes to all of your “Friends” (the term for those whose email addresses you’ve entered into the system). It’s worth noting that your Trusted Contact cannot actually see your list of Friends - so they don’t actually know to whom those notes are going. This not only protects the privacy of the contacts on your list, but also your own privacy. If you are leading a double life, for example, both of your spouses and sets of in-laws can be notified without one being tipped off about the other.

There are three levels of account you can have with Slightly Morbid: the Basic account, the Full account, and the Premium account. In each case there is a one time fee (no monthly fee) of $9.95, $19.95, and $49.95, respectively.

The main differences between the accounts is the number of contacts you can have (10, 30, and 50), and how many categories of type of notification you can have, and whether you can create your own custom category (which you can only do with a premium account).

If you have a lot of people with whom you regularly communicate online, Slightly Morbid, while, well, slightly morbid, may make a lot of sense.

You can check them out, and register for the service, at SlightlyMorbid.com.