About LifePosts

LifePosts’ mission is to ensure that every person’s life story can be beautifully told, vividly celebrated, and preserved.

LifePosts’ easy-to-use storytelling tools enable you to create beautiful online memorials or obituaries, tribute biographies, birthday celebrations, and digital keepsakes for all of life’s important milestones.

Beyond that, you can convert your LifePosts to a custom designed book or a photo keepsake. Learn more. In addition, we have arranged for public and semi-public LifePosts to be preserved for future generations in the Internet Archive, a library of significant works of culture used by the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and other organizations.

Why LifePosts Was Created

Technology gives us plenty of ways of snapping and capturing life’s little moments. The cloud gives us unlimited storage; social media gives us ways of sharing quickly.

But something is not quite right. The treatment on social media is usually fleeting, and mixed awkwardly with posts about boxing kangaroos and political outrages.

Perhaps the biggest challenges emerge during the most significant emotional upheaval — the loss of a loved one. The old solution — the staff-written newspaper obituary — is fading away. Online solutions often lack sufficient beauty and make collaboration difficult. The decline of the obituary and the inadequacy of digital memorial tools have led to a tragic result: more and more people are vanishing without the proper recording of their lives.

We also need a better, deeper way to pull together joyful milestones. We can capture the moments but it’s hard to quickly craft a textured tribute or celebration and guarantee it’s getting to intended readers, your closest friends and family. The cloud has become the New Attic, where our precious memories go to be stored, and ignored.

Good news: there are now great ways to honor the most important people and celebrate the most important milestones.

You can do something quick and elegant, or deep and multifaceted.

You can better enlist friends and family to help – which will both relieve the burden on you and create a tribute that will better capture the person or moment. And you can share these tributes publicly or privately, and preserve them forever.

The Four Pillars

Create
Everyone should be able to tell the story of someone’s life easily and beautifully

LifePosts enables you to tell the stories of someone’s life, whether it’s a simple announcement, or a vibrant, multifaceted web experience.

You can choose from several pre-set milestone types for memorials and celebration.

Memorials

  • Individual
  • Group or Event
  • Pet

celebrations

  • Birth
  • Rite of Passage
  • Graduation
  • Engagement
  • Wedding
  • Birthday
  • Honors
  • Wedding Anniversary
  • Personal History

create your own

  • Possibilities might include: adoptions
  • retirement
  • military enlistment
  • religious conversion
  • sobriety anniversaries
  • being born again
  • and many more

You can use any or all of the storytelling tools — just one, or all three.

The key: you do not have to do this all at once. These tools are designed so you can do a little bit at a time — one moment, one question, one picture. Before you know it, you’ll have a beautiful tribute.

LifeQsWe pose questions. You answer one, or many, at your own pace. Before long, you’ll have an amazing tapestry of memories.

LifeTimeline
A captivating interactive tool organized around significant moments.

LifeStory

An elegant article format that you can illustrate with photos or other media. Write short (a simple announcement) or long (a life story, in chapters) or anything in between.

You can post photos, videos, audio clips or documents from your phone or computer.

And you can copy any photos or videos you already have in Facebook over into your LifePosts library. No need to upload them again.

Here are some great examples of Online Memorials and Celebrations

CollaborateYou shouldn’t have to go it alone

Telling the story of someone’s life or even capturing a particular milestone can be daunting. Don’t go it alone.

We’ve made collaboration easy. When a friend posts a photo, a copy is also made for your personal media library, so you can use it throughout LifePosts if you like.

You can even add Co-Creators — trusted friends and family who manage your LifePost with you.

When you enlist others to help, LifePosts becomes an experience — one that can bring joy and support along the way.

beth-knobal-avatar
Beth Knobel

daniel-okrent-avatar
Daniel Okrent

susan-margolin-avatar
Susan Margolin

Share You can share the stories with friends — and the larger community

It’s easy to share LifePosts on social media, and you can pull your Facebook photos and video directly into your LifePosts with one click.

Beyond making access to your social accounts easy, we are building a way to spread word of your loved one even farther and wider. We’re creating a LifePosts Network of publishers and organizations who love the real stories of interesting people and families. For instance, HuffingtonPost, one of the largest news sites in the world, will be publishing LifePosts.

Our current LifePost Network includes:

    • huffingtonpost

    • americanpublicmedia

    • generosity

    • internetarchives

    • Dodge

We also will share public and semi-public LifePosts on our Amazing Lives page and our social media feeds.

Preserve
Ensure that LifePosts are saved for future generations

We will never take down your LifePost.

Some sites say that in order to see a memorial or other life milestone in future years you have to pay monthly or annual fees — forever. We don’t do that.

Beyond that, we have arranged for public and semi-public LifePosts to be preserved for future generations in the Internet Archive, a library of significant works of culture used by the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and other organizations.

Who we are

Some of the folks behind LifePosts:
Steven Waldman, Founder & CEO

Waldman is a journalist and entrepreneur who in 1999 founded Beliefnet.com, which became the largest multifaith spirituality website. The successful site pioneered many “Web 1.0” approaches to creating high quality content, including tapping into the incredible stories of its readers. More recently, Waldman has become an expert on the transformation of the American news business, authoring a landmark study for the Federal Communications Commission about “the changing media landscape in a broadband age.” When he’s not busy working, he is likely obsessively making photo books to commemorate every vacation and milestone. His wife, Amy Cunningham, is a funeral director and writer.

Aamir Rind, chief technology officer

Aamir is a full-stack web application engineer, specializing in Python and Django. He has built applications for several startups, including Pipl.com and SlateUp.com. His contributions to the programming community have established him as among the top Python and Django developers in Pakistan.

Development and technology support has also been provided by TechAffinity (Rasheed Salih, Vikramsrinath Sriraman, Senthil Srinivasan). Ray Rettino served as our Senior Technology Advisor throughout.

Elizabeth Sams, Executive Editor

Elizabeth was Executive Editor of Beliefnet.  She was formerly an award-winning journalist and documentary film producer for Frontline, ABC News and other news organizations.

Design

The site was designed by Lisa Powers.  Additional design and product work has been provided by Ned Berke, Monica Torrjeon, Brian Cordyack, and Joanna Choy.

SPECIAL Advisors:

Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, Lisa Melmed, Deborah Caldwell, Jean Hellering and Ray Rettino.

Investors:

Lauren Zalaznick, senior advisor Lauren is the former Executive Vice President of NBC Universal.

Our other investors include:
  • Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter
  • North Base Media (started by Marcus Brauchli, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post)
  • Jon Miller, former President of AOL and News Corp Digital
  • Julius Genachowski, Managing Director of the Carlyle Group and former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
  • Larry Hackett, former Managing Editor of People Magazine
  • American Public Media
  • Gary Ginsberg, Executive Vice President of Time Warner
  • Bruce H. McEver, founder and Chairman of Berkshire Capital
  • Jonathan Alter, author, political columnist, television analyst and entertainment producer
  • Susan Margolin, co-founder of New Video Group and President of Docudrama and Special Acquisition for Cinedigm
  • Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America
  • Elizabeth Sams, Executive Vice President of Beliefnet
  • Ethan Devine, partner and Fund Manager at Indus Capital
  • Ava Seave, principal and co-founder of Quantum Partners
  • Paul Noglows, Executive Producer of the Forbes Summit Group
  • Elizabeth Andrion has been a top advisor to two different Chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission
  • Lisa Melmed, consultant for A&E Television Networks
  • David Feinberg, founder of Feinberg Hanson LLP
  • Bob Verrico, founder and Executive Chairman of InvestingChannel
  • David Perlmutter, founder of the Perlmutter Properties real estate brokerage firm
  • Kristopher D. Brown, partner at Dechert LLP
  • Monica Desai, communications attorney

Press Mentions

Price

LifePosts are free.

 

Contact Us

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