
Deadbook, the Long-term Facebook - ColinWright
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/
======
dlss
Sorry if this is me being a "statistical grammar nazi," but he _started his
post with it_... and it's not like misspelling a famous person's name, it's
_spreading innumeracy_.

"There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life
expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years. So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion
people will die"

He's confusing average with actual.

Here's a simple example: imagine we have two people. 1 person who will die in
1 year, and 1 person who will die in 9. The average here is 5 years, and after
5 years only 1 person will be dead, not 2.

While It's not always true that selecting only individuals who have a value
less than or equal to the average gets you half the population, this correct
for normally distributed value when there are lots of samples, so the authors
numbers are basically off by a factor of two.... which he almost notices here:

"So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die. 67.5 years * 365 days is
about 25,000 days. That’s about 280,000 deaths per day average. Right now that
number is lower at about 155,000, but as the population ages that will catch
up with us."

</rant>

~~~
acqq
If everybody was 0 years old now, and the life expectancy were 67 years I
guess you'd have the point?

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dlss
No. Even if everybody was 70 years old I'd still have a point.

~~~
acqq
The life expectancy of 80 means that out of 100 people born 50 will die before
they're 80 years old and 50 will die after their 80th birthday.

But: zero of these 100 people live more than 103 years (if we started with
1000 only 3 would live to be 103 years old):

<http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html>

That means that everybody who is already living now will die in the next 103
years.

If at the moment 7 billion people live on earth practically all will die in
the next 103 years. That their individual life expectancy is 80 years doesn't
change the fact that practically nobody (that is, to the error of 0.5%)
survives his 103rd year.

I started with the US data. If we'd adjust it for the world, we'd see that
even for life expectancy of 67 less than for example 10% of those living now
will survive their 80th birthday or something like that. So the rougher
approximation is that you have to increase the "67 years" some years more but
anyway in 100 years practically everybody living now is dead. Yes he was not
technically right with using the life expectancy of a single person to give
the exact year, but the "cutoff" year is still not much farther away. And how
old are people now actually matters to know how many will die in which period.

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kds
I can't wait for the next Hollywood sci-fi movie in which aliens discover
Earth just to find out that humanity wiped out itself to extinction or
mysteriously left the planet for some reason... but Facebook, YouTube, and
Google - as computational infrastructures - still work (powered on by means of
a rusty switch in some dark industrial facility room) and they start to learn
about humans from their profiles.

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Claudus
Digital media is going to have a very interesting effect on future
generations. Imagine what it would be like if you could watch videos, view
thousands of pictures, and read a detailed account of your ancestors actions
for generations before you.

We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly, history before
the digital age will fade away, much like oral history (before written
history) has for us.

~~~
a3_nm
> We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly

... but we don't know yet if all the data that we create will still be around
in a few generations, and it's far from obvious to me. It seems unlikely to me
that the platforms we use today will still be around at this time, and my
guess is that there won't be a sufficient incentive to migrate legacy data
from one platform to the other (remember Geocities?). Managing the digital
memories of the living is a profitable business, but managing that of the dead
might not be.

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dj2stein9
I expect the Internet and social media is going to continue to evolve and blow
past what Facebook was able to accomplish faster than anyone thinks. I don't
expect Facebook will last as the largest social network for much more than 5
years. And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1
million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in
half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
We're already a few decades past the point that you've described. Email has
been the biggest social network for a long time, dwarfing Facebook and any of
its competitors.

Basically all Facebook users have at least one email account. Then there are
all of the people who don't use Facebook, yet still use email. That's a lot of
people!

Also, that's really only just considering personal email usage, too. Many of
those people, whether or not they use Facebook, use email as part of their
jobs.

Maybe Facebook or some other mechanism will catch up with email at some point,
but that's looking very unlikely.

~~~
dj2stein9
The email "problem" is what Facebook fixed.

Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost
contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning,
birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people....
There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but
are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better
email client for communicating with your friends and family.

A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the
next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the
conventional cell phone carriers completely.

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wooptoo
Don't worry, Facebook won't last that long.

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cstross
You're being excessively literalist about this important point.

Either we're living through the digital dark ages, and any and all personal
records we make will be toast within 30 years, or we're going to leave a _lot_
of information about ourselves cluttering up the datasphere. Whether it's
curated by Facebook or by some other successor entity is beside the point: the
question is, what is the net going to be like when more than half the people
with a presence on it are dead?

~~~
robmil
I'm not sure if it is excessively literal, though; if Facebook disappears
within 10 or 30 or 50 years, presumably all of the data on Facebook will
disappear with it.

Even _ancient_ civilisations kept orders of magnitude more records than have
survived now, and they even had the added bonus of being physical — with
linguistics the only obstacle to future generations' reading of their content.
Our mass of data that seems so permanent is wrapped up in proprietary file
formats; it's stored on volatile media; and it's kept around by companies who,
in the context of centuries, are flashes in the pan.

How much of the digital information you possessed even ten years ago is still
readily accessible? I know in my case there's not a great deal. Now
extrapolate that forward 50, 100, 150 years…

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cstross
_How much of the digital information you possessed even ten years ago is still
readily accessible?_

Most of it. I've been careful.

(Now if you asked about _twenty_ years ago you'd get a different answer; I
think I've lost about 75% of the email, but most of the actual written
material survives. 1992 is roughly when I got serious about personal data
retention.)

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pier0
It's an interesting scenario and very likely, but I suppose FB engineers and
shareholders are not too concerned about Facebook becoming a digital graveyard
in 50 years because they will be dead themselves.

~~~
ColinWright
You're kidding, right? The FB engineers are probably mostly under 30 - you're
assuming they'll die before they're 80?

 _Added in edit: Well, I guess from the downvote(s) that people_ do _assume
the FB engineers will die before they're 80._

 _Added in further edit: It's been suggested that my comment lowered the tone.
If that's the case then I apologize, it wasn't intended to. It's been further
pointed out that from 27 years of age onwards, the male life expectancy in the
USA is indeed 50 years or less. So I was wrong anyway. I've learned something,
for which I am not sorry. I was wrong, for which I am not sorry, because it
afforded me the opportunity to learn. I may have lowered the tone, for which I
am sorry._

~~~
erikpukinskis
If you are a 27 year old male in the U.S., your life expectancy is just under
50 years.

<http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html>

~~~
momotomo
Erm, sorry chap that's a period life table, not an expectancy table. It's
remaining years, not total. If you scroll down eventually years remaining <
age. Unless you count reincarnation no 80 year old is dying before their first
birthday.

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shoham
Silly article, but mainly because it just ASSUMES that a 8 year old company
will exist (in its present condition) for the next 1/2 Century!

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squonk
Facebook will apply the data from each account to the Turing Test. Start with
a database of 67.5 years of e-mail, tweets, photos, voice mail, video mail,
geo-location, blogs, purchase history, social networks, all from one person.
Then add AI and a remote presence device, and we can all live on.

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thought_alarm
How many dead people are on MySpace?

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spindritf
It doesn't matter for the network itself, just like it doesn't matter how many
accounts are dormant because you don't see those who are not active. Yes, data
belonging to people who have passed will be stored there, somewhere, on a
server and backed up to a tape but rarely accessed.

It won't be like standing in a graveyard. It will be like sitting at home,
with you friends and family, knowing that those photo albums on the shelf are
full of pictures of people you won't see again. Every once in a while you'll
look through them but otherwise life will go on.

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flaviojuvenal
Note that life expectancy is an average, meaning that a number as low as 40
years usually means a high infant mortality rate. See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Interpretation_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Interpretation_of_life_expectancy)

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DanBlake
iirc, 1000memories is billing itself as facebook for dead people.

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andrewljohnson
A living book of the dead sounds like a wonderful thing.

~~~
zerostar07
It sounds like a horrible thing, if half the pictures in your friend list are
of dead people you knew and cared about.

~~~
antihero
A way to revisit old memories, or a place to be constantly reminded of how
much you miss someone.

~~~
zerostar07
There's a reason we dont bury the dead in our backyard.

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thejosh
Right, hah. Noone is buried in my backyard.

~~~
zerostar07
... That reassuring tone sounds suspicious !

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5xz41s0P8T5N
Where's the math behind the 50 years estimate? That would be of more interest
that the number-talk at the beginning of the article.

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guilloche
As discussed in the article, facebook needs to worry about it 30 years later.

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mochizuki
Every time, the background on this guys blog gets me.

~~~
ColinWright
I went and looked, but I can't see anything off about the background. Someone
in the comments talks about flickering, but there's no flickering for me -
everything looks fine.

So what are you seeing, what browser/OS are you using, and have you tried, you
know, telling him?

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nsns
It's mind boggling that for the author people are either alive or dead, no
one's sick or incapacitated, and everyone have access to the Web. Utopian
much?

(Dare I guess it was written by a white affluent young male?)

~~~
batista
> _It's mind boggling that for the author people are either alive or dead, no
> one's sick or incapacitated, and everyone have access to the Web. Utopian
> much?_

It's mind moggling that you raise this point and call it "mind boggling".

What's "ming boggling" about it? People are either alive or dead, period. And
for the purposes of the article, that's the only distinction that matters.

What if someone has the flu or is in hospital for 6 months, or even looses his
leg or something? Does that affect his Facebook page, besides him neglecting
it for a while maybe? And even if it did, what the duck does it have to do
with the topic that interests the article, i.e the amassing of pages by dead
users?

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no_gravity
"There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life
expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years. So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion
people will die"

Really? I have the feeling that the author confuses "average life expectancy
from birth" with "average life expectancy from now on". And thinks that a live
expectancy of 67.5 years means that all people alive today are dead in 67.5
years. And forgets to take into account the deaths of people who are born in
the future.

The average live expectancy of all living persons is much lower then 67.5 more
years from now. Maybe half of that? Additionally people will have children and
some of these will also die earlier then in 67.5 years. And some of the
children will have children who die earlier etc.

The result could actually be right, but it would need some more explanation
how it was calculated.

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bostonpete
Maybe all this is true, but even if 8 billion people die in that period, the
author's statement is still true since 7 billion people have to die in order
for 8 billion to die.

I don't see the point of this kind of nitpicking. It's doing nothing to
further any sort of conversation on the topic -- it just seems needlessly
critical.

~~~
cstross
The key insight is that data retention may, in the long term, exceed human
life expectancy. So that most of the visible records of people will be about
the dead rather than the living.

US (and to some extent European) culture tends to have a big taboo surrounding
death and the dead, and only a small part of it is to do with the USA being a
very young nation that has grown rapidly in population (so that it has a much
higher living:dead ratio than many other countries). In pre-computer times,
our records of our dead were confined to dusty parish registers and the
occasional photograph. What does it mean to live in a society where dead
people all leave thousands of geotagged photographs, videos, lifelogs, blog
entries, and canned rants?

The long term cultural implications are fascinating ...

