Interesting article on CNET related to the issues with estate planning in the on-line world. The problem is getting messier with users moving a lot of their financial and organizational information on to the web. One of the suggestions in the article is that on-line users, add all their passwords and account information to their estate plans. This really does not work if it means that you need to update your estate plan, every time you create a new account or change a password. The problem is worse if users are trying out new sites, especially with so many cool services like GMail, GCal or stock trading companies coming on-line. What we need is a universal mechanism to store all the passwords and other on-line identities in a central location. The access to this central location is what should be passed on, in a structured manner. There are systems like Inforcards, OpenID, SXIP that provide these services…let’s just hope that these systems see strong adoption.