Ask YC: With startups starting to implode what happens to the user data? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: With startups starting to implode what happens to the user data?

What happens to the social graphs, blogs, and other information that is held online? Does it get liquidated to the next buyer? Where does all the data go? For example Pownce has been liquidated. Where does the social graph and microblogs go?

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It depends. Sometimes it's just mothballed/destroyed. Sometimes the acquirer keeps running the service as-is (that's what happened with kiko.com). Sometimes the user data is sold off to the highest bidder.

Did you get to keep the data as well? Is there a standard practice to this?

We didn't; I'm not sure what we would have done with it if we did.

Good for you: doing another startup right after Kiko. That's very awesome.

Did you take any time off in between startups? How'd it play out?

2 of the justin.tv founders were kiko founders.

Including me :-).

We took off about 3 months in between when we decided to close down kiko and when we moved on to Justin.tv, although that's fuzzy because kiko wound down over a month or two and Justin.tv took a few months to ramp up to full speed.

That's great. So much of startup success/failure is due to like & timing and it's exceptional to see you give it another try almost right away (and it seems to have worked!). Better than getting a real job right :)?

"Sometimes the user data is sold off to the highest bidder."

Do you have any source for this, anecdotal or otherwise? While the paranoid part of me wants to think that happens, the logical side is having a hard time believing it.

I've seen it before. Sometimes it's actually not bad at all (person A takes over posting to person B's mailing list), and sometimes it's horrible (selling the email addresses for your webapp to spammers).

I would love it if they would make a properly annonimized version available for research. (Social graphs in particular) Not likely to happen any time soon, though. Specially after the AOL search data debacle.

drop database <failed company>

It's a great question, with all the data that people willingly share online now, there's little thought to what happens to it if it's not cared for/looked after. What is the companies legal obligation once they no longer have a need for the data? Do they destroy it? Who checks on this? Or do they simply drop it into an xls spreadsheet and auction it off to a spam house...

Pownce owes it to the user community to make their data available to them. I would suggest only those users connected to the social graph it contains should have access to it -- they built it.

Any other use/sale/provision of the data should be held to a vote of Pownce users

... or whatever users were using the service that shut down.

In the case of Pownce, it /was/ made available to them. The community was given 2 weeks and a set of tools to export all of their data.

That's cool then! That makes me smile. I never used Pownce, I have to admit, so I wasn't up on it, but it'd have been nice to be a member just to have a large dataset like that to play with.

Read the TOS next time. Seriously. Web 2.0 isn't a democracy.

It isn't, but it can be.

we feed the data monster om nom nom nom! </reddit>

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