Follow up to ‘I am with Louis’: Where is my conversation?

Interesting thought just came to me (which further enhances the fact that we need to have a system here – sort of like the Web archives).

With the conversation moving away from blog posts (maybe not entirely but certainly incresingly more and more) what about the history side of this.  Take something like Twitter.  I have often wondered where will this service be in 5, 10 or even 15 years (holly moly that is a long time).  Certainly it won’t exist the way that it does today but what if didn’t exist at all.  With so much activity going on outside of the traditional web page – how are we going to keep track and record this?

The web pages are easy.  We have the “Way Back Machine” to help us remember what the world looked like 5 years ago.  If someone were to research a topic for say an article – would they be able to capture the essence of the conversation?  Could they grasp the tone of the community and understand what the statements meant at the time?  And what about all of the effort being put into these communities – one would hate to see that get lost.

We need a “Way Back Machine” for Twitter and Shiftr and FriendFeed and whatever other application appears in the next 5 years funded by some fool which ultimately goes out of business.