SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Internet Archive is working to preserve public Google+ posts before it shuts down
Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.
In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted. They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content. They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution.
Related: Google+ Shut Down After Data Breach and Cover-Up are Exposed
Senators Demand Answers About Google+ Breach; Project Dragonfly Undermines Google's Neutrality
Google+ Bug Exposes Non-Public Profile Data for 52 Million Users
Death of Google+ Causing Angst
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:50AM (2 children)
Puh-lease! I'd prefer not to be plagued with horrendous nightmares, thank you very much!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 19 2019, @10:08AM
Then again, I'm not sure I ever saw anything of value on G+, mostly as their pages rendered blank without JS enabled.
I'm also not sure I ever saw anything of value on Orkut, which was their previous attempt at social networking. Maybe they're just not good at this game. I'd have thought it would make more sense for them in particular to just scrape and datamine, and let someone else waste time and money with all the storage and management of the source data.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 21 2019, @12:38AM
Not sure what you are referencing: Using Facebook, or the prospect of trying to back it up it?
I'd like to think that there are preservationists out there already considering the challenge of doing that and how they would go about it.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:46AM (2 children)
there were like, what, 33 1/3 people on google+?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday March 19 2019, @05:05AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 19 2019, @09:34PM
Steve Yegge is on G+, and his essay there about "Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus" [google.com] about software liberals and software conservatives has been influential in the Game Boy homebrew development scene. Liberals engineer for rapid development (the "move fast and break things" mentality); conservatives engineer for long-term provable reliability. (The concept is orthogonal to social and economic conservatism, as they are to each other.) I sent him an invitation to Google Hangouts a couple days ago with intent to ask permission to archive this essay elsewhere, but he hasn't accepted it yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:35PM
As in topic. Archive Team is not Internet Archive, probably IA put their crawlers in too, but AT is running their "voluntary botnet" for it.
More interesting thing, there's a discussion in AT how it could be possible to backup a whole IA :).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:41PM
maybe it will help teach a lesson about using saas shit.