A lot of what we hear in relation to teens and social media is about how permanent and persistent it is. I'll never forget the Google engineer who attended one of my first talks at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley telling me — your stuff really is online forever. But what if it's not? Or if you suddenly can't find it? I know my friends at Alloy might be bummed that I'm posting this (they bought Sconex and recently decided to shut it down), but I have been fascinated by the comments I have been getting on my post R.I.P. Sconex over the past few weeks. They have been trickling in after teens searching to find out what happened to Sconex discover my post. There is a visceral sense of loss and frustration that profiles these teens thought were permanent were not. That a site could actually shut down. That when they uploaded photos, posted poetry, etc., that it would be stored there forever — no need to save copies somewhere else. And to be fair to Alloy, I have been forwarding them the commenters' emails and know they are following up with these teens. From some of the comments:

It's just the place where I had letter from my friend that passed away. Pictures, letters, his phone number [I'm sure it no longer exists] but it was all saved there. Now it is all gone.

i am so upset. i had a journal on sconex, and i had been keeping it for a year. i have depression problems, and i would write where no one would see on the journal on sconex, and all my thoughts, all my revelations, and all my poems and other things i had saved on that journal are gone. and it hurts cause that was all my hard work. feels like a year of my life disappeared.

awww man, i had so much of my poetry and writing pieces….so muchhhhh pages and pages….now its alll goonne…

Its kind of crazy for it to just be deleted that was the only place where u can find ppl from the past …

I'm raising this issue because in these tough economic times, I think we could see more youth oriented sites shut down. And in an era of user generated content, that means people's comments, creations, photos and more end up disappearing for all practical purposes (just maybe not from Google's databases). Young people (and even not so young people) on these sites feel like they have helped to create these communities and even if they are no longer active, they view them as personal archives. Remember the outcry when Disney shutdown its Virtual Magic Kingdom? It makes me think that as part of talking to youth about their online lives, instead of just stressing the persistent nature of what gets posted, we should also stress the temporal nature of online businesses. On the business side, I think companies need to be mindful when shutting down a youth site to communicate to their users about what's happening and give them an opportunity to grab their "stuff" or help them recover it after the fact.

Categorized under: Web, Youth Marketing

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