Remember Friendster? Of course you do. If, by chance, you have any old photos on Friendster, you might want to download them soon. Friendster is going to delete old posts and photos, permanently. For me, this serves as a reminder to be careful who we entrust with storing our data (yes, I’m looking at you Facebook). Today, it seems unfathomable that Facebook would fade into obscurity. But, Friendster was once a smoking hot property too, although, it never had the as many users as Facebook has now. No matter how promising a site’s long term prospects look, we should think about how we may want to preserve the data we share on these sites. Especially when we have little control over how or when the data will be deleted.

Friendster’s move to purge data also makes me wish Diaspora were out of private beta. It would be wonderful to have the ease of sharing that sites like Facebook and Flickr give us, while, at the same time having control over the storage of the data.