Thursday, January 24, 2008

Stories, Pictures Lost Forever

This is a very real problem that will only escalate, as we use more and more web applications.

For instance, I don't know how to save my data from ClipMarks. If an account is canceled, do all my links and Clips to blogs die. These are important issues to discuss.
clipped from www.portigal.com


Stories, lost forever
Thursday January 10th 2008, 2:58 am by Steve Portigal

As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so.
miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.
all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience).
All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others in is gone.
cr_portigal.jpg

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

DataPortability is a movement to create these tools where they don’t exist. I hope someone creates something for flickr soon.

 blog it

2 comments:

jpblogger said...

Came across this via Jaiku. Wow. This is really too bad ...

neochonetes said...

Thanks for your supportive comments. I thought this was a very important problem within the burgeoning interactive online applications and the people who make them popular.
Yes, several of my colleagues and I are discussing this issue. I am hoping that as we evolve into the use of online applications, some excellent hacker/programmer will find a way for the rest of us to retain our data.
It seems to me that Flickr has lost out also, but I am not sure that they understand what the loss of data, community and confidence means for them. That is too bad for all of us.