If We Don’t Save Our Memories, Nobody Else Will

“Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file,” says Scott Rosenberg in a post looking at whether we can trust social networking sites with our history.

This is the real issue I have with Facebook: it’s going to go down, and it’s going to take your online life along with it. All things considered, the fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter is that the data you throw onto Twitter can be pulled right back out of the service. (I’ve just started using Tweet Nest, which allows you to take on the responsibility for archiving your own tweets on your own server, and it’s fantastic). In a practical sense Twitter don’t own your tweets: they host them.

From an “I’m-only-interested-in-the-now” perspective, Facebook works just fine. You click on stuff that’s been uploaded over the past twenty-four hours, and Facebook gets a whole heap of ad revenue off each of those clicks. Fresh data = $$$.

But from a long-term perspective, Facebook is broken. Your data is trapped with a company that has little-to-no obligation to save your memories. Because old data is likely to generate fewer hits, Facebook has a very real incentive to delete all photographs or movies that hit a certain threshold: say, anything that hasn’t been viewed in the last twelve or eighteen months. Can you imagine the shitstorm if they implemented that policy today? But how about in ten years? Twenty? Why should Facebook give a damn about storing those prom photos you uploaded all the way back in 2006 that are getting two clicks a decade? Those photos might be important to you, but to Facebook, that’s just a dozen megabytes that aren’t generating squat by way of revenue. Then add on all the other data you’ve uploaded that you no longer look at (but might want to look at some day) and multiply that by a hundred million.

We didn’t kick up enough of a fuss when Geocities closed up shop. Now it’s up to non-profit groups like Internet Archive to trawl through the wreckage and salvage what they can. Yahoo, it should be noted, did not see any reason to keep their own active Geocities archive. The lesson to be learned – particularly as we transition to storing even more of our data in the cloud – is that the only person who really gives a damn your memories is you. You’re either fine with the fact that your data could disappear tomorrow, or you use services that let you put yourself in charge of your own virtual shoebox.

If you knew that all of your data would be gone within a decade, would that change the way you used Facebook?