I have a total of almost 50,000 photos stored in social networking sites, and some online journals that are worth a lifetime. What if one day the digital space crashes? Will everything just vanish into nothingness like all of these were sucked in by a black hole? With Friendster’s demise and News Corp looking at selling MySpace, the world suddenly realizes that social networking has a lifespan and is mortal—it dies.

When Pelago was acquired by location-based frontier Groupon, Whrrl’s fate was decided—it will be closed by the end of the month. This news has caused stir amongst its 600000 users. But, Kristen Nicole discussed a possible diversion of the Whrrl users’ data, Bizzy. Bizzy also offers location-based services and offers recommendations on where to eat, play and shop.

Another solution in the market today to ensure that you’d be able to access your data 10 years from now is Data Integrity Verification, functionality within the Bluescale 11.3 product. This was supported by Molly Rector, vice president of product management and worldwide marketing, Spectra Logic saying, “Customer satisfaction and confidence in their backup and archive data is at the forefront of all we do. Data Integrity Verification dramatically reduces risk, ensures enduring access to archived data and is fast becoming a data center requirement. Spectra Logic is pleased to offer it as a free upgrade, which reflects our strong commitment to providing customers the world’s best archive storage.”

Ben Kerschberg wrote in a Forbes article a comparison between the internet and R.R. Tolkien’s “seeing stone,” featured in Lord of the Rings: “The armies of Mordor are vast and scary, but we can destroy them as enemies by making them our friends.  Increasingly, we see organizations adopting broad information governance strategies and programs that deal with all information-related risks, including customer information, trade secrets, personal information, intellectual property, employee issues, forensics and internal investigations.  The seeing stone sees not only these, but their relationships to the organization’s brand and ethos.  Helping the organization find and maintain proportionality with that level of analytic power is a great and challenging job indeed.”

Data storage and consumer concerns around being able to save and access content in a long-term have been surfacing following demise of social networks and other niches within the digital sphere.  Several difficulties are encountered with storing unstructured data by most companies including the following: repetition and waste, unclear record coding, search problems and knowledge management.  As we apply more consumerism to the data world, we’ll have to subsequently seek out new solutions to give them their own form of immortality.