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Several months after Kim, a US woman living in Los Angeles, died of a long incurable illness, many of her friends continue to visit her personal profile on Facebook, leaving messages every week, just as they would have done if she were still alive.

"I miss you so much sweetheart," her brother says on one of the messages on her wall. "Steve and I were talking about you last night. We went to a party and all those parties with you came to our mind. We both love you so much," Margaret, one of Kim''s neighbours, says on the next message.

Facebook, a social networking tsunami, has spread in barely six years from the Harvard dormroom of founder Marck Zuckerberg to envelope almost half a billion people, a number equivalent to the world''s third most populous country. Its impact has changed not only the way in which we live our daily lives, but the way in which we face death as well.

More and more people every day are asking their relatives to keep their Facebook profiles active as part of their last wishes and final arrangements. The deceased person''s wall remains, giving their online friends the opportunity to leave messages with their thoughts and prayers.

Facebook itself has noted this tendency and has taken care of the situation. What to do with the profiles of the people who have died? The social networking site has decided to memorialize those profiles if requested so by the family.

When someone passes away, their friends or family contact Facebook and request that their profile be memorialized. Once that request is processed, the user will cease to show up in Facebook''s suggestions, and information like status updates won''t show up in Facebook''s news feed.

Memorializing the account removes certain sensitive information and sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in a search. The Wall remains, so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance. If relatives prefer not to have the profile stand as an online memorial, Facebook says it will remove the account altogether.

For Igor San Román, founding member of SocSoft, Facebook has not only changed our ability to interact with our friends, but also enables us to remember and pay tribute to the deceased.

"It is a new chance to remember our beloved ones without forgetting that the network has memory and such commemorative tributes will remain on those Walls for good," Igor San Román explains.

"It is one more way to pay tribute to a person who has died," says Jose Antonio del Moral, manager of Allianzo, a social network of bloggers. "It is like a death notice but 2.0.," he adds.

"Digital life" industry

"Death 2.0," "digital commemorative profiles," "virtual cemeteries," and "digital legacy on the Internet" are some of the most recurrent expressions that have been coined to deal with the emergent phenomenon of our "physical (offline) life" being survived by our "digital (online) life," says Pedro J. Oiarzabal, a research scholar at the University of Deusto (Bilbao) , specialist in new technologies and migration.

What should we do with the "digital life" - e-mail accounts, social network site profiles, websites, online publications, photographs - of our loved ones when they have passed away?, Pedro J. Oiarzabal wonders.

This phenomenon has created a tiny industry that manages your "digital life" after your death. "After receiving an official notification of the death of one of their registered users, companies such as SlightlyMorbid.com, LegacyLocker.com, GreatGoodbye.com, MyLastEmail.com, and DeathSwitch.com communicate the sad news to the deceased''s online friends and deal with their e-mail addresses and social network profiles following the instructions left by their clients," Oiarzabal explains.