How to Stage Your Own Death in Six Easy Steps With the If I Die Facebook App

​Ah, Facebook. It's both the best loved and most hated site on the Internet, providing you with hours of procrastination material at the office while simultaneously providing evil corporations with your personal information. With each new timeline twist and resetting of its privacy settings, users worldwide utter one universal cry: "Facebook, you are dead to me."

And now, thanks to If I Die, you can be dead to Facebook.

The app, launched in late 2010, posts news of your death to your Facebook wall when three friends of your choosing independently confirm that you have, in fact, croaked. It's simultaneously morbid, sick, and silly. Naturally, we had to try it out. So we joined the ranks of Jon Bon Jovi and Fidel Castro and pranked the Interwebs with news of our own demise. Here's how it worked.

Step One: Install the app
The If I Die installation process is the same as any other Facebook app, with one very big difference: You are imagining your own death the entire time. If I Die's main page doesn't do much to assuage any fears you may have about the memories you'll leave behind:

​"What will you leave behind"? If we weren't worried about that before -- which we weren't; otherwise, we wouldn't even be using Facebook in the first place -- we certainly were worried now. But hey, at least any "SWEET JESUS, MY LIFE COULD END AT ANY TIME" feelings inspired by the subject matter are offset by its promise of "life after death," not to mention its cheery, Twitter-meets-pearly gates interface, right?

The YouTube video in the above screenshot helpfully explains the purpose of If I Die, complete with an adorable, animated grim reaper and cartoons meeting all manner of gruesome ends:



They're right -- we don't remember scheduling an appointment with death! And we still have to flip the bird to all our exes and remind our loved ones to wear sunscreen! Thank goodness for If I Die. We clicked "leave a text message" to continue. (We also had the option to record a "last words" video, but hey, we're bloggers, not movie stars.)