The internet is a transient place. If websites were physical buildings, they would be dorm rooms or post-college landing pads, not colonial mansions. The kind of places you decorate with furniture found in Ikeas and on curbs. The kind of places you hang up dart boards in the living room, and place mouse traps by the fridge. The kind of places you stay for a year, then move out of when better digs come along. While there’s something comforting knowing a website has no closing costs and no mortgage, there’s always that sense that it’s not a permanent place to live online.

In the early days, there wasn’t much of a sense of loss when a site or online service got shut down. I had a low ICQ number, and thought the service was amazing (at the time), but when all of my friends starting using AOL’s Instant Messenger, I abandoned ICQ without a second thought. All that mattered was what network was best for communicating with my friends. As a budding guitarist teaching myself how to play Smoke on the Water, it was devastating when OLGA (the Online Guitar Archive) got shut down, but the reality was that it was a listing of .txt files which was easily replicated, and even more easily distributed on peer to peer sharing networks, especially as the average connection went from a 28.8 modem to something that didn’t beep and whirr when you connected to the internet.

Audiogalaxy was the first site that I was actually upset about when it met its demise. It still exists, in some form (I believe it’s similar to Grooveshark these days), but once upon a time it was a Napster meets Pandora paradise of music assimilation. It wasn’t about just having a lot of songs, it was about making connections to bands you’d never heard of. I found a lot of great new music on that service, and it somehow did a better job of making the connections than anything I’ve seen since. I was sad when it got shut down, but again, I didn’t have anything tied into the service, nothing I had gained from it was lost by it’s closure.

This isn’t an elegy for the Internet of days gone by, it’s a concern for the days ahead. As more things move online, we still have no proven track record for how long these services will last. I caved in and gave Spotify $5 this month to get rid of ads, and I’ve been diving into the service. It’s definitely a value for a musical omnivore such as myself, but every time I create a new playlist and load it up with songs I don’t own, I wonder how long this service is going to actually last. Especially when I’ve paid only $5 for what is, by RIAA lawsuit calculations, about $7 billion worth of songs. I’m equally concerned about my Evernote account, as it has become my go to information saving place, and is a service I find incredibly useful for which I’ve paid exactly zero dollars. Apparently they are profitable, and they recently made a statement about how their goal is be a “100 year company”:

Remember that scene in The Social Network when Sean Parker says,

“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”?

Well, we don’t think a billion dollars is all that cool either. You know what’s really cool? Making a hundred year company.

I agree, a hundred year company would be cool. The only thing is, up until now, hundred year companies tend to a) sell things, and b) sell physical things, and c) sell physical things that are universally required and have had the good fortune of never being replaced. Things like cars and hand tools and food come to mind. So does a online data and information storage company last 100 years? No, I don’t think they will. But will they last long enough for me? That’s an entirely different question.

“Will it last long enough for me” is the standard by which I judge websites and web services now. I’ve more or less given up on Facebook recently. Not because I think Google+ is better (it’s not, it’s full of dudes and animated gifs of cats), but because it has lasted long enough for me. Just like Myspace did. At some point, social networks become repetitive. You could argue that it’s because of the user base, and that if I just made new friends, I wouldn’t feel that way, but that’s not the case. People come to expect a certain level of interaction with a social site, and the expectation from Facebook is that people will play Farmville and post about how their dog is cute. And that’s all some people want out of it. It’s no different than when Myspace became a site where everyone expected a page to play someone’s favorite song and have inane, highly emotional status updates, or when everyone expected Livejournal to be emoticons and shitty poems, or when everyone expected a Geocities page to be blink tags and animated flame gifs. All of those sites lasted long enough for me to be interested by them, use them to organize groups of friends from a certain period of time, and then move on to the next best friend organization site, conveniently leaving the riff-raff behind.

I don’t worry much about the transience of the internet. I used del.icio.us for a while, and realized, after saving a hundred or so sites to the service, that I never revisited any of them. So I stopped using it. The vast majority of content online is fleeting and essentially unnecessary. There’s a small percentage of services that I do expect to last, like online banking, at least as long as their physical counterparts. Do I trust a site like Mint to last as long as my bank accounts do? No, I don’t. Do I expect to pass my Evernote notebook full of recipes on to my grandkids? No, but only because I assume food will produced by robots a la the Jetsons by then. I see the Internet not as our Great Pyramid, not even as our Coliseum, but more our Library of Alexandria: a vast collection of information that will be lost over time, never recovered, but never really missed once it’s gone.