How many of us still have accounts on networks that are long forgotten? (Friends Reunited anyone?).

I have a couple of statistics that might be of interest here:

1. 20 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute – Source.

2. 850 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each month, costing an estimated $100 million for servers each year and $1 Million for electricity each month – Source.

This mountain of data will eventually become a problem – its simply not sustainable.

The ability to be able to share pictures, video and text with people across the world in seconds is no doubt beneficial to humanity – but how useful are pictures of “Dave” drunk at last years Christmas party. They may be interesting/entertaining soon after the event but in the long term they loose the little value they had.

Will we soon have to consider data relevance and expire data that is considered valueless? and who can make such a call?

I’m off to delete my Flickr account :)

I do like the idea of being able to store away a momento/message to leave friends and family when i die. Being a techie though I wonder how feasible it is however to maintain the playability of the data when the time comes. Some data formats are sure to become dodos and whilst a company has preserved the data, will they also take on the responsibility of being able to make sure that it can be played back?

A good topic. I never thought about lapsing domains until you brought it up. I’ll have to think some more on that :)

cheers

T