treat the event the way it’s supposed to be treated, and celebrate the person’s life and provide people with the right set of tools for sharing.”
That’s definitely an unfilled niche on the Web. The “Circle-of-Life.com” concept, which seems like a good one to me, has been out there for the taking ever since Komisar’s book, but nobody has ever really tried to build it. There are obituary sites like Tributes.com and Legacy.com, that are attempting to do to newspaper obits what Craigslist did to classified ads, and there’s even a MySpace-like photo and video site called Respectance that boasts it is “the first to use emo-social media, the combination of rich media with relevant content, to provide an outlet for emotional expression.”
But there really isn’t a site that puts the deceased person first, without a layer of advertisements and offers around the personal stories. “We want the person to dominate the experience,” says Adler. “That’s why we’ve chosen to create a home page with a full-screen photo [of each memorialized loved one]. There’s the ability to share photos and videos, the ability to write stories, and there’s a guest book feature, where you can see who’s contributed…The greater ambition is to provide a place to capture people’s life stories.”
One example is the memorial to John Krettek III, who died of cancer last year at age 28. Created by his sister Danielle Krettek, an employee at Apple, the 1000Memories pages for Krettek include more than 250 photos uploaded by friends and family, as well as personal reminiscences both long and short. (From the sound of things, Krettek was a life-of-the-party type and a wicked-smart programmer.) Another example is the memorial to Eual “Yogi” Adams, a fishing boat captain from Half Moon Bay, CA, who died July 9. Huneycutt says the Yogi Adams pages attracted thousands of views after a link to the site was printed in a newspaper obituary for Adams and on his fishing club’s website.
John Krettek’s pages include one unique feature of 1000Memories: the “Projects” area. Adler and his co-founders say they wanted to give 1000Memories visitors a way to do more than just share memories, so they built the Projects template to give friends and family members a place to coordinate fundraisers and other activities. Danielle Krettek is using the projects area to collect donations for JK3, the John Krettek III Foundation, which aims to provide Apple iPads to help entertain and nurture patients undergoing chemotherapy treatments. The first hospital to receive the devices will be Missouri Baptist Cancer Center in St. Louis, MO. (To process donations, 1000Memories turned to WePay, another Y Combinator-backed startup that handles online group payments.)
The projects pages “will expand over time,” says Huneycutt. “We’re starting with the simplest set of tools we can offer, to help people collect money and give updates about the project.” In the future, he says, 1000Memories may help users with the legal paperwork to set up non-profit foundations.
Huneycutt, Adler, and Good didn’t start out knowing they were going to build a site honoring lost loved ones. Their story is partly a case of a team of would-be startup co-founders looking for a good idea.
Huneycutt and Adler are longtime friends who went to the same elementary school in Arizona. Much later, they collaborated with a third friend, Victoria Criado, on a 2007 photography book called The Border Film Project; it was a compilation of photos taken along the
