Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by this article.
Friendster to Erase Early Posts and Old Photos (By JENNA WORTHAM Published: April 26, 2011)
“The impermanence of the Web used to be a way of life,” she said. “A site could be gone in weeks, months. But Google and Gmail came along and changed that, and now we always expect to have a copy of our lives online.”
Friendster’s plans to strip the service of older material reminded some of Yahoo’s move in April 2009 to pull the plug on GeoCities, an early provider of free Web home pages. At the time, Internet tinkerers and historians worked to keep the site’s millions of pages from disappearing forever. Jason Scott is the founder of a group called the Archive Team that tries to save such online content. He recently rallied efforts to preserve clips from Google Video, which Google is shutting down in favor of the more popular YouTube.
Mr. Scott said that the shuttering of social Web services and online communities was a “critical cultural issue.”
“This is the everyday neural activity of a world, of a society, scooped up and saved,” he said. “To me, that’s completely valuable and worthwhile to make sure it is saved for the future.”
Mr. Scott said his group planned to try to download as much of Friendster’s public data as possible before it is erased at the end of May, and to make it available online in some form.
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