[avdempsey]

13 year old Americans (in families that can afford a computer with broadband) will have their whole social lives cataloged on Facebook or its successor. Indeed, even younger children will have their milestones shared by their eager parents, until they are old enough to take over. This is the divide: those who've had the ultimate social family tree preserved in a convenient database, and those who go on a road trip to search public records for traces of genealogy. Any effort an oldster takes today to preserve 'who they were' will pale next to a lifetime of crowdsourced social biography.

[iron_ball]

Overly optimistic. When Facebook dies -- and let us assume it will some day die -- who will import its data and carry on? Who will archive it? They save everything, today, but I doubt "long-term store of knowledge about individual humans" is one of their explicit design goals.

[donaq]

Well, Geocities used to be a behemoth only a company with mega resources like Yahoo could undertake. When it went down, a few individuals archived most of it [citation needed]. I'd imagine that if and when Facebook goes down, something along those lines might happen.