Tweet from the grave |

You may wonder what will happen to your Twitter account once you die. Maybe you’re worried that all your followers will miss all your funny Tweets and rants, or maybe that’s the last thing on your mind.

But what if I told you there’s an app that will look at your Tweets and use computer algorithms to analyze your Tweets to learn about things you like, your tastes and the way you speak. Then it pretends it’s you, once you’re dead. Sounds like something from The Twilight Zone, right? Well there’s an app for that.

The app is called LivesOn, and it will do just that! It will Learn from your Tweets and then ” When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting”, says the company’s tag line. It will write tweets, share news stories and favorite tweets for you, giving you a social afterlife. It sounds like a viral advertisement for some movie or video game, but apparently the product is real and will be launched in March.

You nominate an “executor” for your account, so once you do die they can go in and press a button to indicate that you died. Then it looks at your current and past tweets. I assume it uses the new “Twitter archive” feature to get all that old data, since the API only goes back about 2,000 Tweets and I’m currently at 53,871 Tweets on mine.

Then once it has your Tweets, it analyzes them and creates a feed of auto generated tweets where you can give it feedback to help it become more like you. I guess it’s using some sort of machine learning algorithms.

@JeyyLowe it's not a stunt, it's not commercially viable. we're doing it with a Uni as R&D A.I experiment.

— LivesOn (@_Liveson) February 21, 2013

It seems to be an experimental Artificial Intelligence research project with an unnamed university. The whole thing sounds insane and funny but interesting at the same time. I’m hoping this will lead to more advanced A.I’s. But then again, if a A.I became better than humans, then what’s the point of us humans anymore? So much excitement and questions at the same time about the future of things. Imagine you’re Tweeting with a bot with a human name and photo, and you didn’t even realize it but held an intelligent conversation.