What happens when Facebook doesn’t tell you a friend has died?
Yesterday, interface designer Caryn Vainio wrote about the unexpected death of a friend she kept in touch with through Facebook. Before his death, the friend posted a status update about being in the hospital. But Vainio hadn’t seen the message, despite habitually reading every post on her feed in chronological order. Mutual friends didn’t remember seeing the post, either. “Not only have I lost a friend, a bunch of us are horrified that we never knew, and we don't know if he KNEW we didn't know,” she wrote. “In the age of online relationships that social media companies claim to facilitate in a positive way, this feels ... unacceptable.”
Vainio’s story inverts a common complaint about Facebook accidentally inserting painful memories into...