Futurismic

People seem to be waking up to the impermanence of the web of late. TechDirt points us to a mainstream journalism article at the Globe & Mail, which springboards from the imminent nuking of GeoCities to worrying what will happen to all of your pictures uploaded to Facebook when it eventually (and inevitably) goes the same way. [image by jonas_therkildson]

Lately, there’s been so much discussion about the permanence of information – especially the embarrassing kind – that we have overlooked the fact that it can also disappear. At a time when we’re throwing all kinds of data and memories onto free websites, it’s a blunt reminder that the future can bring unwelcome surprises.

Ten years ago, you could have called GeoCities the garish, beating heart of the Web. It was one of the first sites that threw its doors open to users and invited them to populate its pages according to their own creativity. At a time when the Web was still daunting, it encouraged laypeople to set up their own homepages free of charge.

Kinda like the forerunner of MySpace, then, albeit (somewhat ironically) easier on the eyes and ears… and MySpace’s days are certainly (and mercifully) numbered, if the traffic figures are to be believed. But I digress…

And now, it’s curtains. GeoCities won’t disappear entirely. The Internet Archive – a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco dedicated to backing up the Web for posterity’s sake – is trying to salvage as much as it can before the deadline hits. At least one other independent group is trying to do the same. But this complicates things, because it puts GeoCities users’ data into the hands of an unaccountable third party.

Money-losing websites aren’t exactly novelties. Smaller sites flicker in and out of existence like those bugs that only have 18 hours to mate before they die. But it’s disconcerting to see a big site – one that, long ago, was one of the most popular on the Web – not just fade into obscurity, but come to its end game.

It bring to light some truths about data that are easily overlooked. Websites are like buildings: you can’t just abandon them indefinitely and expect them to keep working. For one thing, that electronic storage isn’t free. Storing files requires media that degrade and computers that fail and power that needs paying for.

The obvious answer here is to make sure you have local backups of anything stored “in the cloud” that you couldn’t bear to lose… but it’s only obvious to those with some degree of computer savvy, and (based on personal experience) everyone else is insufficiently bothered to worry about it ahead of time, no matter how patiently you try to explain the situation. If nothing else, there’ll always be good money for people who can write custom API scraping tools for defunct social networks… that business model will be the new equivalent to the photography studios places who now make their income by scanning and retouching old snapshots from the pre-digital era.

But other changes in the way we use the web are very much afoot, as pointed out by Clive Thompson at Wired. For the last decade, classic search has been the dominant internet tool, propelling Google to the top of the pyramid. But this is the age of Twitter, the temporal gateway into the “real-time web”; maybe the old surfing metaphor will finally make more sense when we’re all riding the Zeitgeist of trending topics:

For more than 10 years, Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority. The company measures which sites have the most links pointing to them—crucial votes of confidence—and checks to see whether a site grew to prominence slowly and organically, which tends to be a marker of quality. If a site amasses a zillion links overnight, it’s almost certainly spam.

But the real-time Web behaves in the opposite fashion. It’s all about “trending topics”—zOMG a plane crash!—which by their very nature generate a massive number of links and postings within minutes. And a search engine can’t spend days deciding what is the most crucial site or posting; people want to know immediately.

[...]

“It’s exactly what your friends are going to be talking about when you get to the bar tonight,” OneRiot executive Tobias Peggs says. “That’s what we’re finding.” Google settles arguments; real-time search starts them.

Well, at least we’re not going to be short of things to argue about. If that ever happened, the web would probably close down due to lack of interest…

Jonathan Zittrain explores some of the downsides of the incipient cloud computing revolution in this article at the New York Times:

If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service.
…
The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.
…
This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like.

As useful as storing links, calandars, emails, and documents in the cloud is I like to keep local backups of all my stuff (where possible). The further threat to the decentralised innovation that has characterised software development over the last several decades is another reason to be sceptical of the benefits of the cloud.

[image from Dan Queiroz on flickr]

So, once we’ve managed to tighten up on inefficient technologies and business practices in the transport industries, we’ll be home free on this environmental stuff, right?

Well, no. The little metal box that Futurismic lives on – doubtless in some anonymous room full of similar boxes – is doing its little bit to consume energy and, in the process, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. So much so that projections suggest data centers will be bigger polluters than the air travel sector in little less than a decade. [image by Jemimus]

Hyperbole aside, this makes it clear how rapidly we’re expanding our use of server farms – and with the growth of cloud computing that trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon. But as is pointed out immediately on Slashdot, there’s a lot more scope for the data centres to cut down on their pollution levels than for the airlines.

At least, I hope so. The thought of bloggers becoming pariahs in the same way the SUV drivers have makes me a trifle uneasy …