The forerunner to social media as we know it will be deleting stored content from its servers in the near future.

The Friendster network was bought by a Malaysian company in 2009 and is still active as a social gaming site popular in several Asian countries. For American users, the site lingers on the web like a ghost town, harboring frozen memories of life in the early aughts.  Since the great Facebook emigration, older networking sites now serve mainly as time capsules.

Some former Friendster users have expressed disapproval at the company for planning to erase their digital mementos. In an age when personal materials like letters and photos are often stored on the internet, the question of what ought to be preserved arises. While images and text can be saved to a hard drive, part of the nostalgia of social media comes out of navigating the old networks as they were back in the day. Clicking between pages can trigger memories more dynamically than just browsing saved data, as Facebook is keen to remind us when it suggests we peruse old photos and conversations.

But what kind of obligation does a defunct company have to its former users? Friendster doesn’t seem content to keep up operations just to be an occasional nostalgia dispenser. After all, there’s no reason that former users couldn’t just import old photos to Facebook. I’ve already seen plenty of “nostalgia albums” as it is.

The frustration at Friendster’s imminent content dissolution also calls into question the issue of how we’ve adopted the internet as a brain-extension in certain ways. Most people carry a portal to most of the world’s information in their pockets. We seem to feel entitled to have even our personal memories backed up somewhere on the internet.

I know I’ve felt frustrated at certain hosts for failing to keep my content online for all eternity. I had a Geocities account back in the day, and I’m sure looking through my site would be a laugh now. Those of us who grew up alongside the boom of the net have lost plenty of memories in cyberspace. But isn’t that the point of memory—to recall things we can no longer experience? It might be healthy to lose records of certain periods in our lives, to trust only ourselves to retain them.

It makes you wonder when other sites will realize that they’ve lost enough relevance to begin deleting their content. MySpace, the next “big thing” after Friendster, is only holding their ground thanks to scenesters and musicians—and even the musicians are slowly moving to better territory like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. It seems a pretty clear concession of defeat to declare so much of your user data obsolete. Now that our online socialization is firmly grounded in one system, I wonder how long it will take for the losers of the soc-net race to give up and pack their stuff. 

(via The New York Times)

(screencap courtesy ajb{log})