Slashdot Mirror
Before Google+ Shuts Down, The Internet Archive Will Preserve Its Posts (theverge.com)
Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery."
But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge: In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted... They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution...
They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content.
A bit of history: Linus Torvalds launched a Google+ page in 2017 called "Gadget Reviews" -- where he made exactly six posts.
But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge: In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted... They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution...
They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content.
A bit of history: Linus Torvalds launched a Google+ page in 2017 called "Gadget Reviews" -- where he made exactly six posts.
Both of them?
Kind of sad. It was an easy place to see all the technical communities. Now they're scattered.
Even Linus couldn’t really warm up to Google+...
#DeleteChrome
I think that decades from now, or maybe even further down the road, historians will start to take a large amount of interest in stuff like this. Not because there's anything particularly important in those posts, but instead to get an idea of what people were like and how their concerns were similar or different to present times, in much the same way we look at old letters from dozens or even hundreds of years ago.
One of my favorite courses in college was actually a history class that involved nothing of dates, important people, or memorable events. Instead it focused entirely on the common people and how they lived and went about their lives. It gave me a much greater appreciation for history and is something that really stuck with me. The humanities usually get a hard time from the STEM side, but when they're well taught I believe that they're as valuable educationally as any of the other courses that I took.
Sadly, Google will probably keep the brand and elaborately skin the 400 error page you will undoubtedly get for years if you accidentally try to go to the Google+ home page.
Quick everyone! Fire up your old accounts and post all the porn you saved from Tumblr. Lets make sure it doesn't get lost forever.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
And it will still have room for their 1.9GB porn collection
Watch it rot. Eventually it will be unreadable, like Google's archive of Usenet.
Instead of urging users to delete their accounts to prevent backup this archiving should be opt in vs opt out. I understand that would make what they are doing more difficult but that's the way it should be.
Unlike mainstream social media and Google, Archive.org (the PBS of the internet) is there for the user, touting Universal Access to Knowledge. Rather than being driven by ad revenue, Archive.org is there to serve the best interests of the public. Ideally, non-profits, such as museums like The Smithsonian (and the public) are better served to have an Archive.org page of videos instead of on Youtube. Watch 'Google: Behind the Screen (2006)', especially the segments where Archve.org founder Brewster Kahle talk's about our reliance on 'Google searches' (instead of multi-source searches) diminished our capacity to acquire knowledge. It remains to be seen whether Google will order a take down of Google + instances like certain lawyers are of 'Wayback Machine' pages.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
view-source:https://killedbygoogle.com/
Linus Torvald's g+ page was something I used to follow periodically. But I can't remember ever getting into a google+ page because a google search pointed a interesting result to it. I wonder how big portion of g+ traffic was going to Linus' page alone.
âoeStudy the past, if you would define the futureâ - Confucius
...that they can't go back in time and archive all the Compuserve content from way back. Compuserve was the first worldwide BBS, a forerunner to the consumer internet. It's "home" was DEC server in Columbus, Ohio. Since many companies and individuals used Compuserve as they do the web today, when the service disappeared, a ton of useful data was lost. Although nothing like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, it still was a great loss of history.
I hope they don't forget the 3.4 million URLS from 2017 left in 50,000 sitmap.xmls files randomly left ~2 years ago... It's always a riot to pick one and see if that person made ANY posts.. ever.
The constraints on the preservation must be either real (Google's fault), legal (Google's fault, or privacy), or Google's decision (Google's fault) Reasoning: I'm guessing it's cheaper and easier for Google to provide IA with the data directly from the backend rather than scrape.