MySpace has successfully managed to irk what’s left of its original user base by going ahead and pushing through an update that removes everyone’s old blog content. While at this point there’s no clear answer as to whether these blogs will ever be retrievable, MySpace has told users to vote on the idea of getting their deleted content back.
Understandably, those who still hangout on the original MySpace aren’t too impressed with this. A lot of the messages made mention of the fact that a lot of time and effort had been invested on the part of the user to create the content , while others also bemoaned the fact that no warning or grace period had been given before MySpace deleted users’ blog posts.
When any sort of hosting service reaches an end-of-life or decides to discontinue its services, the decent and usual thing to do is to warn users ahead of time, give them a chance to download a copy of their data, and where applicable recommend an alternative (as Backupify and TweetBackup recently did with SocialSafe).
It remains to be seen what will happen in the case of MySpace, but given the overwhelming negative reaction from its users and the fact that there will be a vote on whether to reinstate content, it looks like the original social network may have realised the error of its ways and will carefully back-pedal on this. However, this whole episode just goes to show that you can never be too sure what fate awaits your digital social memories when you only store them online.
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