Deadbook, the Long-term Facebook

I went and looked, but I can't see anything off about the background. Someone in the comments talks about flickering, but there's no flickering for me - everything looks fine.

So what are you seeing, what browser/OS are you using, and have you tried, you know, telling him?

batista2• 14 years ago

What background? Looks like a bog standard gray background with some noise thrown in for interest.

Claudus• 14 years ago

Digital media is going to have a very interesting effect on future generations. Imagine what it would be like if you could watch videos, view thousands of pictures, and read a detailed account of your ancestors actions for generations before you.

We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly, history before the digital age will fade away, much like oral history (before written history) has for us.

agumonkey• 14 years ago

History will be a lot easier, which is good, less myths is always good. But maybe it will allow our brains to be lazy since there's no more missing link to solve.

ordinary• 14 years ago

I don't think history before the digital age will fade away any more than it already has, thanks to the likes of the Internet Archive and Wikipedia.

lukeschlather• 14 years ago

We're talking about Facebook. Even if you mark something as totally public, the Archive still can't crawl it. Facebook is not a part of the public Internet.

a3_nm• 14 years ago

> We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly

... but we don't know yet if all the data that we create will still be around in a few generations, and it's far from obvious to me. It seems unlikely to me that the platforms we use today will still be around at this time, and my guess is that there won't be a sufficient incentive to migrate legacy data from one platform to the other (remember Geocities?). Managing the digital memories of the living is a profitable business, but managing that of the dead might not be.

davidjohnstone• 14 years ago

If future generations judge me based on what I post publicly online (and that includes Facebook), they will get a very superficial picture of me because I'm careful to not post more. Perhaps I should keep a diary.

nsns• 14 years ago

It's mind boggling that for the author people are either alive or dead, no one's sick or incapacitated, and everyone have access to the Web. Utopian much?

(Dare I guess it was written by a white affluent young male?)

batista2• 14 years ago

>It's mind boggling that for the author people are either alive or dead, no one's sick or incapacitated, and everyone have access to the Web. Utopian much?

It's mind moggling that you raise this point and call it "mind boggling".

What's "ming boggling" about it? People are either alive or dead, period. And for the purposes of the article, that's the only distinction that matters.

What if someone has the flu or is in hospital for 6 months, or even looses his leg or something? Does that affect his Facebook page, besides him neglecting it for a while maybe? And even if it did, what the duck does it have to do with the topic that interests the article, i.e the amassing of pages by dead users?

Muzza• 14 years ago

> (Dare I guess it was written by a white affluent young male?)

Yes, us awful young white males are never sick.

prima-facie• 14 years ago

Don't worry, Facebook won't last that long.

cstross3• 14 years ago

You're being excessively literalist about this important point.

Either we're living through the digital dark ages, and any and all personal records we make will be toast within 30 years, or we're going to leave a lot of information about ourselves cluttering up the datasphere. Whether it's curated by Facebook or by some other successor entity is beside the point: the question is, what is the net going to be like when more than half the people with a presence on it are dead?

robmil• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if it is excessively literal, though; if Facebook disappears within 10 or 30 or 50 years, presumably all of the data on Facebook will disappear with it.

Even ancient civilisations kept orders of magnitude more records than have survived now, and they even had the added bonus of being physical — with linguistics the only obstacle to future generations' reading of their content. Our mass of data that seems so permanent is wrapped up in proprietary file formats; it's stored on volatile media; and it's kept around by companies who, in the context of centuries, are flashes in the pan.

How much of the digital information you possessed even ten years ago is still readily accessible? I know in my case there's not a great deal. Now extrapolate that forward 50, 100, 150 years…

no_gravity• 14 years ago

"There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years. So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die"

Really? I have the feeling that the author confuses "average life expectancy from birth" with "average life expectancy from now on". And thinks that a live expectancy of 67.5 years means that all people alive today are dead in 67.5 years. And forgets to take into account the deaths of people who are born in the future.

The average live expectancy of all living persons is much lower then 67.5 more years from now. Maybe half of that? Additionally people will have children and some of these will also die earlier then in 67.5 years. And some of the children will have children who die earlier etc.

The result could actually be right, but it would need some more explanation how it was calculated.

bostonpete• 14 years ago

Maybe all this is true, but even if 8 billion people die in that period, the author's statement is still true since 7 billion people have to die in order for 8 billion to die.

I don't see the point of this kind of nitpicking. It's doing nothing to further any sort of conversation on the topic -- it just seems needlessly critical.

cstross3• 14 years ago

The key insight is that data retention may, in the long term, exceed human life expectancy. So that most of the visible records of people will be about the dead rather than the living.

US (and to some extent European) culture tends to have a big taboo surrounding death and the dead, and only a small part of it is to do with the USA being a very young nation that has grown rapidly in population (so that it has a much higher living:dead ratio than many other countries). In pre-computer times, our records of our dead were confined to dusty parish registers and the occasional photograph. What does it mean to live in a society where dead people all leave thousands of geotagged photographs, videos, lifelogs, blog entries, and canned rants?

The long term cultural implications are fascinating ...

DanBlake• 14 years ago

iirc, 1000memories is billing itself as facebook for dead people.

kds• 14 years ago

I can't wait for the next Hollywood sci-fi movie in which aliens discover Earth just to find out that humanity wiped out itself to extinction or mysteriously left the planet for some reason... but Facebook, YouTube, and Google - as computational infrastructures - still work (powered on by means of a rusty switch in some dark industrial facility room) and they start to learn about humans from their profiles.

thought_alarm• 14 years ago

How many dead people are on MySpace?

squonk• 14 years ago

Facebook will apply the data from each account to the Turing Test. Start with a database of 67.5 years of e-mail, tweets, photos, voice mail, video mail, geo-location, blogs, purchase history, social networks, all from one person. Then add AI and a remote presence device, and we can all live on.

dj2stein92• 14 years ago

I expect the Internet and social media is going to continue to evolve and blow past what Facebook was able to accomplish faster than anyone thinks. I don't expect Facebook will last as the largest social network for much more than 5 years. And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality.

jseliger• 14 years ago

And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality.

It's possible, but the alternate hypothesis is that Facebook now has a sufficient number of users that network effects will keep those users locked in, provided that the company itself doesn't do anything ridiculously stupid.

Which will happen? I have no idea: the future is hard. But a plausible story can be spun in either direction.

PommeDeTerre• 14 years ago

We're already a few decades past the point that you've described. Email has been the biggest social network for a long time, dwarfing Facebook and any of its competitors.

Basically all Facebook users have at least one email account. Then there are all of the people who don't use Facebook, yet still use email. That's a lot of people!

Also, that's really only just considering personal email usage, too. Many of those people, whether or not they use Facebook, use email as part of their jobs.

Maybe Facebook or some other mechanism will catch up with email at some point, but that's looking very unlikely.

dj2stein92• 14 years ago

The email "problem" is what Facebook fixed.

Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning, birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people.... There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better email client for communicating with your friends and family.

A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the conventional cell phone carriers completely.

shoham• 14 years ago

Silly article, but mainly because it just ASSUMES that a 8 year old company will exist (in its present condition) for the next 1/2 Century!

pier0• 14 years ago

It's an interesting scenario and very likely, but I suppose FB engineers and shareholders are not too concerned about Facebook becoming a digital graveyard in 50 years because they will be dead themselves.

ColinWright3• 14 years ago

You're kidding, right? The FB engineers are probably mostly under 30 - you're assuming they'll die before they're 80?

Added in edit: Well, I guess from the downvote(s) that people do assume the FB engineers will die before they're 80.

Added in further edit: It's been suggested that my comment lowered the tone. If that's the case then I apologize, it wasn't intended to. It's been further pointed out that from 27 years of age onwards, the male life expectancy in the USA is indeed 50 years or less. So I was wrong anyway. I've learned something, for which I am not sorry. I was wrong, for which I am not sorry, because it afforded me the opportunity to learn. I may have lowered the tone, for which I am sorry.

erikpukinskis• 14 years ago

If you are a 27 year old male in the U.S., your life expectancy is just under 50 years.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

rdl• 14 years ago

I suspect FB engineers are going to live longer than average for US population, too, since they have higher income, education, etc.

5xz41s0P8T5N• 14 years ago

Where's the math behind the 50 years estimate? That would be of more interest that the number-talk at the beginning of the article.

spindritf• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter for the network itself, just like it doesn't matter how many accounts are dormant because you don't see those who are not active. Yes, data belonging to people who have passed will be stored there, somewhere, on a server and backed up to a tape but rarely accessed.

It won't be like standing in a graveyard. It will be like sitting at home, with you friends and family, knowing that those photo albums on the shelf are full of pictures of people you won't see again. Every once in a while you'll look through them but otherwise life will go on.

dlss2• 14 years ago

Sorry if this is me being a "statistical grammar nazi," but he started his post with it... and it's not like misspelling a famous person's name, it's spreading innumeracy.

"There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years. So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die"

He's confusing average with actual.

Here's a simple example: imagine we have two people. 1 person who will die in 1 year, and 1 person who will die in 9. The average here is 5 years, and after 5 years only 1 person will be dead, not 2.

While It's not always true that selecting only individuals who have a value less than or equal to the average gets you half the population, this correct for normally distributed value when there are lots of samples, so the authors numbers are basically off by a factor of two.... which he almost notices here:

"So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die. 67.5 years * 365 days is about 25,000 days. That’s about 280,000 deaths per day average. Right now that number is lower at about 155,000, but as the population ages that will catch up with us."

</rant>

acqq2• 14 years ago

If everybody was 0 years old now, and the life expectancy were 67 years I guess you'd have the point?

dlss2• 14 years ago

No. Even if everybody was 70 years old I'd still have a point.

hobbyhacker• 14 years ago

Everybody that will be born between now and 67.5 years from now will have exactly that same life expectancy, half of those will die as well.

flaviojuvenal• 14 years ago

Note that life expectancy is an average, meaning that a number as low as 40 years usually means a high infant mortality rate. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Interpretation_...

Deadbook, the Long-term Facebook

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