Online Life Expectancy is the duration of time a web page or web site is expected to stay online before being replaced, updated or closed.My blogs are an example of websites which are not expected to remain online forever. I say this as I have mentioned numerous times that I often go through phases where I remove content and rework things. My facebook profile was another prime example, having been deleted last June almost 6 years worth of content went with it.
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated before they are published. If you want your comment to remain private please state that clearly.