If I Die…Please Leave A Message

File this one under the “Things To Do Before I Die” category.

If I Die, the new Facebook app for when you're prepared to send the very best -- and the very last.

There’s a new website where you can leave a message that will only be published after you die.

Seriously.

“If I die” is the name of it, and no, I didn’t find out about it because someone who was dead left me a message.

This is just one of those Web phenomena where you can’t decide A) Why didn’t I think of that? or B) What WERE they thinking?!

Here’s how it works: You install the “if I die” Facebook app on Facebook, with all the concordant permissions to use your data (including, presumably, longgg after you’re gone).

Then, you create a video or text message (I’m thinking video.  If you’re going to have to deal with me after I’m dead, I want you to see my once living visage live and in the flesh!).

Then, you must choose three trustees among your friends, who also presumably will confirm A) That you kicked the bucket and B) Will validate your “if I die” message so it can be made public.

But the best part of the Web site was the campaign they ran to get people to sign up for the App. Apparently, the hesitancy wasn’t that people were worried about their privacy after they were gone (although it’s inevitable Facebook will change their privacy policy AGAIN long after I’m gone).

No, it’s that nobody wants to believe or think about the fact that someday, when they least expect it, they’re going to die.

So the campaign used the API of popular location-based services like foursquare and Gowalla to identify still real, living breathing humans when they checked into a place, and then called to the place of the check-in to ask if they could speak to the person who checked in so they could explain that someday they were going to die, and that they really ought to think about leaving a message well in advance of said inevitable demise using this nifty new Facebook app.

Wow, who would have thought that the campaign to drive adopters of the app could be any creepier than the app itself??  Is there some kind of new “Do Not Die” list so I can be spared such interruptions when I’m simply trying to get a Double Latte at the Starbucks?!?

You can watch the video below to learn more.  Me, I’m off to start my death preparations in a more old school manner: making out my ‘bucket list!’