Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The Ephemeral Web
At its heart, Web 2.0 is about data and sociality. Data, because it thrives on content that's machine readable therefore easily re-purposeable (think mashups), and social because human networks and informal categorization systems (tag-based taxonomies or "folksonomies") provide much of the metadata that helps up navigate, filter and organize it.
Yet one of the ironic consequences is that as the we before more data-fied and social, it seems to be becoming less permanent, and more ephemeral. This makes sense though, because a lot of what Web 2.0 is about - between the lines - is the massive decentralization of knowledge repositories.
Some of this web amnesia is just sloppiness - because open source relational databases like MySQL are so dead easy to setup and use, data storage is now in the hands of millions of amateurs, instead of a few thousand professional database managers. As the dominant model for building new services moves more towards plugging databases together on the fly, rather than scraping and centralizing them in big repositories, all of the classic problems of database integrity are being multiplied. Things are getting lost.
It doesn't take long to discover other places where the web's memory seems to be getting patchy. Personal sites of mine that were fairly well preserved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine just 5 years ago, now appear to have had significant chunks deleted or relegated to tertiary storage. Cuil, a new search engine launched last week, claims to index as much as 3 times as many web pages as Google. Who knew? It is also well known that most of what's on the web, stored in private databases, is inaccessible to Google. Without a 3rd party to view and verify, who knows what's being forgotten there?
On the positive side, Web 2.0's emphasis on open architectures means that many databases, especially the most important social ones, will be queried and replicated in an infinite number of ways. For instance, while Twitter (the ultimate ephemeral web app) doesnt provide good access to older messages and conversations, apps that build on its open structure, like TweetDumpr, are addressing the problem.
Perhaps the ultimate ephemeral web app though, is Firef.ly, launched last week. A single line of Javascript, Firef.ly allows people to chat on top of web pages using cartoon-style pop-up bubbles that fade out after about 15 seconds. While a TiVO-liek timeline lets you roll the conversation back, it seems to me that Firef.ly is taking this "forgetful Web" weakness and flipping it on its head, and creating value out of it.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm taking an "end of the world" approach to digital preservation. I give myself a $50/month budget at the Apple iPhoto store, and create bound albums of my important photos on a regular basis. I expect them to last at least 100 years, long after the web has moved beyond anything I'll recognize.