Facebook is sniffing for corpses

Facebook's crack statisticians and demographers have discovered that social networking is increasingly popular among dead people.  This poses a problem; Facebook has a strong corporate anti-necromancy policy, and does not want its software to encourage you to reconnect with the deceased.


In 2007, Facebook added a feature that allows you to turn a dead person's profile into a "tribute page," but this change has to be initiated by a user, and most people don't know how to do it.  So Facebook developed software to look for certain phrases in profile messages that indicate a dead user.


If you use these phrases, Facebook may dispatch a death assessment technician to your house.  This person will poke you with a stick to see if you twitch.  Please keep this in mind if you are prone to posting status updates like:


"Lol! My body is room-temperature."
or
"I feel fat today because the decomposition process is bloating my corpse with noxious gases."
or
"I am hungry.  For BRAAAAINS."

"I'm really into Farmville lately."

Here are several useful facts to help you get the most from your dead Facebook friends:

1.  Mordant humor has been in style since before Willy Wonka cracked jokes about a little girl falling into an industrial garbage incinerator. Internet trolls know that dead people's blogs, tweets and profile pages have always been an excellent source of lulz.  For example, people who die in horrific drunk driving accidents often have retrospectively ironic drunken party pictures on MySpace. Psycho killers are sometimes psycho twitters. Learn what Wonka knew: the best comedy is frequently accidental, and often has a high body-count.

"There's going to be a lot of garbage today.  By which I mean dead children."

2.  Facebook relies on users to help it clean up its database.  It is considered good netiquette to let Facebook know about all those people you've been murdering, so it can convert their profiles to tribute pages. 

The Empire is no longer friends with Alderaan.

3.  When someone close to you passes, you can use Mafia Wars to send a dead fish to everyone on your shared contacts list.

"When you re-tweet this message, add a frowny-face emoticon."

4.  Vampirism cannot be transmitted through Facebook, but the CDC isn't sure yet about the zombie plague.

"But if you love me, why did you change your relationship status to single?"

5.  If you can't stand the humiliation of your daily life anymore, don't forget to take down any embarrassing photos before you kill yourself.