Respectance - share your memories

The 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, is expected to be marked with a special memorial service, television documentaries and floral tributes from the public. Mourners not wanting to trek to the gates of Kensington Palace with flowers, however, can log on to a commemoration site – Respectance.com – where they can share their memories of the “people’s princess”. (more)

Online memorials haven't made much of a mark on the landscape, so why is respectance.com different?... (more)

Most people see the recent explosion of social-networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook as new avenues to stay in touch with friends or promote breaking cultural trends. Richard Derks, co-founder of Respectance, an online tribute site with offices in San Francisco, saw the latest networking developments as an opportunity to create something a little more profound. (more)

Respectance, which is unique among social networks since it’s dedicated to remembering those who have died, has taken $1.5 million in a series A funding in a round led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. The site also launches officially today, and says it has taken funding at a “pre-user” stage. (more)

Respectance is a social networking site for online tributes, or as the email sent to me so nicely put it: “MySpace for dead people”. Respectance provides a space for family and friends to honor their dead loved ones by creating online tributes. Whilst similar tribute profiles do appear on MySpace or Facebook, Respectance differs by being dedicated entirely to the dead. (more)

Social networks used to be for everyone. A new crop is catering to niche groups - like the bereaved. (more)

When horror and death struck the Virginia Tech campus in April, friends of slain students turned to Facebook to set up memorial pages to honor the students' lives and share their memories and grief over losing them so violently and so young. (more)

There are certain social landmarks around which our lives are built: births, marriages and deaths are the obvious ones. So far these landmarks are absent from the social web. There are exceptions but, in the main, our online social interactions are restricted to the trivial. (more)