How Failed Social Networking Sites Can Benefit from Archiving the Web Pages

Social networking has been around for longer than we think. Although many of the sites that were around in the pioneering stages of the internet are still around, many have disappeared from the internet without saving any of the information that was there during it's hay day. One of the biggest site that might come to mind for those who remember it was Geocities. This site was a huge success when it came out and people around the world, including children, learned how to make their own web pages so that they could share with the world. Where are those pages today? They are gone from the internet. They were obliterated by Yahoo who no longer felt that is was worthy of focusing on it. Others had a different idea and may well benefit greatly from their actions of archiving as many of the Geocities pages as they could before the site shut down.

How Failed Social Networking Sites can Benefit from Archived Web Pages Rather than Purging them:

Genealogy- There was a vast wealth of personal and family history on the web pages of Geocities. Families put their information on these pages to share them with chat friends from other sites. There were very few ways to share photos of yourself and your family in those days with people from around the world that you chatted with. Creating our own websites was the easiest way to get pictures out there to people very easily. Along with photographs, we shared information that was important to us. In the years to come, those pages that Geocities obliterated could have been used as a part of a Genealogy website for users to find family members and get photos that they may not otherwise be able to see. Social networking sites that just delete all the information in the system rather than archiving it somewhere have shown little vision for the future and how profitable those pages really could be later on. Genealogy is a huge business and Geocities had more genealogy than you could shake a stick at. So do sites like MySpace, which could be the next social networking site that takes a dive into the black internet hole. Purging the information from the system is like taking billions of dollars and using it for a really big bonfire.

Historic Internet- If you were part of the early 1990's social networking era, you are a part of Historical Internet social networking. Things were very experimental in those early days of the internet and social networking. Very little was known about how it would go over, but it went over in a big way to bring the internet to where it is today. The information that was and is on those types of websites is critical for future generations to see where we have been and where we are currently at. If you ever viewed one of the early pages on the above-mentioned Geocities, you would know that it wasn't high tech stuff. In fact, all of it was amateurs working towards an unknown goal. The look of yesterday looks nothing like the internet of today. It's much like when you look at some of the first video gaming systems we had. They are ancient looking compared to what we have today. Is there a value in them? Yes, the value is history. Internet information is a little more valuable though. It shares a time and place that will never be regained. Pages from failed social networking sites can help put the pieces of many puzzles together for people in the future. That can be worth money to the person who owns them, but more importantly, it is worth a lot of knowledge that would otherwise go unviewed.

Research for Success to Future Social Networking Sites- If you consider the fact that when millions of pages were purged out of the internet in the name of no longer being useful to the site that owns them, it might make you stagger a bit. If you are to move into the future with success, you have to look at what worked in the past and what works in the present. Sometimes, looking at a failed website and the information there might give you a closer look at what not to do in the future. Most businesses will look at the business model of a successful company to find out what does work. It is just as important to know what doesn't. This can make future ventures much more successful and profitable. Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.

The above are just a few reasons why it benefits a failed social networking site to keep the information on the site. It helps give a picture of the past and the past can often pay off in bigger ways than you think. If you can't find a monetary reason to archive the information, choose to do it because it will provide future generations with an unprecedented way to look at their history. In any case, archiving those pages from failed social networking sites can benefit the owners rather than purging the pages.