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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

I understand the article is sarcastic, but let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people. From a wide angle view, this is pretty significant.

Imagine if you had the capability of examining your great-great-grandfather's life at the daily level. How amazing would that be? To localize this, imagine yourself in your 80's being able to zoom to any day of your life at any point to relive and review how you thought, what you thought at that particular moment.

This is what I use Facebook for. Sure, I use it to connect with my friends, but I also use it so that when I'm knocking on death's door, I'll have something concrete to look back at that is more stable than my ailing memory will be. I'll also be able to hand it down to my spawn and their spawn.

I've always considered Facebook a new kind of public utility, just as revolutionary as the post office used to be.

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In the old days people wrote diaries. That way they could choose whom to share their story with, they could burn them or they could hand them to their spawns.

I don't see how that is any different with the privacy settings in Facebook.

And I think it's superior to a diary in that it's not only recording my thoughts on something, but also the minutiae of my day to day, whom I've associated with and my interactions with them, etc.

I'm a little surprised at the responses my original post received actually. Am I the only one that uses Facebook for this purpose?

the likelihood is far higher, however, that in just 20 years time all the history you've entered into facebook will be gone. Not sure facebook see themselves as a public service, and I'm very sure they're not inclined to spend huge amounts of money archiving terabytes of dead people's data indefinitely

20 years ago, a 40MB hard drive was "standard". I'm sure they'll go the way of the floppy in 20 years.

The storage situation in 2031 would be pretty mind boggling.

20 years ago a 40MB hdd was sufficient. 20 years ago, a 486 was more than capable of running Windows 3.1 or OS2 and playing great games.

20 years on, and nothing's changed. I still need a modern spec machine to run an OS or read a word doc. My drive is still almost full. My machine is still not quie fast enough and my internet is too slow

Expectations change. Sure, in 20 years time the data we're creating now will seem like such a tiny amount, but that amount won't stay constant. The amount of data we produce each year is a proportion of available storage, not of our activity.

What I'm trying to say is that facebook have a lot of data by today's standards, but they'll also have a lot of data in 2031 by 2031's standards.

tough call. i exchanged speed for quantity with my ssd. i sort of suspect most people are going to do the same. I think it depends on how many T of video people want to hang on to.

Sure storage will get bigger and faster, but just like cpus, the transition from quantity & speed to energy efficiency will happen sooner than you're implying.

> let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people.

And selling the data to advertisers.

Why do you think Facebook will still exist by the time you die? If you want to keep your data for an extended period of time, it would probably be better to do it yourself.

You can download all of your data from facebook now. It's a link at the bottom of your account settings. Only thing of importance missing is your comments you left on other's status updates. To think if Facebook bit the dust that someone else wouldn't do something with that data is almost unthinkable at this point.

Are the timelines public, or friends only? If they are friends only, I hope my great-great-grandfather could befriend me from the grave somehow.

Wow. Just wow. :/

Why the long face?

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