My friend, Victor (SuperPixels) via Twitter:
Since someone closed their YouTube account, video of me singing Rocket Man ala Shatner is probably gone forever :(
It’s so disappointing how bad this situation is as we approach 2012 and as everything in our lives is stored on the web. Me in 2009:
For some reason, my YouTube account and channel was simply deleted. All of the videos I’ve edited and placed on YouTube or simple videos shot with my Qik camera and even things that were recorded directly to YouTube via my MacBook’s webcam were completely deleted. I even have Qik setup so when I stream from my iPhone, those are transferred to YouTube via the cloud automatically. Only 10 of my 40+ videos are saved locally because I trusted YouTube. Why would my videos suddenly vanish or be deleted and if I did do something that broke copyright, wouldn’t they simply remove that video?
My account was restored and I quickly downloaded all of my YouTube content. The video of Victor singing Rocket Man is gone forever. What a bummer. He’s really funny and, to him and his friends, that’s disappointing. Here’s the tweet where Victor posted a link to the video in March:
Not only is this record completely wasted now, but the people who retweeted it like John Biggs have a reference to a tweet that references a video that is no longer available. Basically, everything is broken except for Victor’s claim that he did this but there’s no record of it beyond his statement. How disappointing.
The broken link happens millions of times a day. Each time a service goes away or an account is deleted, the links are destroyed. Unless the media is made redundant where, for example Twitter were to copy each image or video to its server, then your tweet would forever have an available media attachment until the end of time. This is of course until you deleted your Twitter account or Twitter ceased to exist.
Of course, I’m the only person that really cares. I’m not the only person who uses MemoLane and Backupify and ThinkUp to keep track of all of my activities online. There are a few of us that download all of their Facebook data once a month and backup WordPress and Email mailboxes. We’re a small population but we’re out there. It really comes down to the value we put on our time. I take the time to compose a tweet and I’d like to see that tweet stick around for longer than a few weeks. Via Twitter’s API, you can only go back to the last 3200 tweets. Did you know that? I do and that’s why I backup my tweets once a month. These things are important at least to me. It sucks that video of Victor is gone now. It’s depressing actually maybe not to him but to me. A part of his life is gone. What a depressing though. I know it happened but the record is gone and that’s what matters to guys like me who don’t remember things about their life and have holes where memories used to be.
Why isn’t our data more important?
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