Sanaz Ahari just sent me a Facebook message that Steve Rider has passed away, he died from pre-leukemia on June 5. He was diagnosed just a year ago. I interviewed him back when I was a Microsoft employee and he was doing incredible work, both back then and then at iLike.com. He was one of the most innovative people I met at Microsoft and was behind early live.com efforts.

Add to last weekend’s tragic death of Rajeev Motwani, who was one of the early people involved in Google and a well respected Stanford Professor, and it just makes me sad.

Today my work is dedicated to both of them. They both improved my life with their work, I wish I could come up to that bar that they’ve set with their all-to-young lives.

You probably have a will to protect your assets. Things like bank accounts. Houses. Cars. Kids. If you don’t, you should.

But what happens to your online life? Who gets the ability to tell your friends about your funeral on Facebook? Who gets access to Flickr to download all your photos? Who owns your URLs (some URLs are worth millions, so they should be protected the same way your house is with a will, but most people haven’t thought about it).

Well, Jeremy Toeman wondered why he couldn’t protect his online life the way he could protect his bank account so he built a new company: Legacy Locker.

Here he explains how the site works. In Part II he gets even more in depth.

It costs money, but so does doing a will. Now that more and more of our life is online this is a useful service and one you should consider.