Diamonds are forever, Yahoo sites are not

April 25, 6:11 PMArlington Internet and Tech ExaminerDavid Silversmith

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Many people continue to believe that content they upload to the Internet and Yahoo in particular is as long lasting as diamonds.  Unfortunately, many folks who believe that are not having fairy tale endings to their content stories.

Take the example with Yahoo! Photos which closed on September 20th, 2007. Its eighteen months later and you can still find people going "Where are my Yahoo! Photos!"  Just check out this recent question on Yahoo Answers where somebody is asking "I have lost all of my yahoo photos as it has been closed. please tell me where can i get those back?"  Yahoo emailed people, they posted messages and they sent more email but many people missed those messages and lost their photos.

A similar event is about to happen again as yahoo has announced that "After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!" I have twenty bucks that says in September 2010 you will still be able to find people wandering the Internet looking for their Jumpcut videos. 

As Yahoo strives for a better business model they are doing the same with GeoCities where they announced that "After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer."  They are no longer accepting new accounts and by the summer they will be sharing how current users can move their content.  The question, of course, is how many Geocities page owners will read those emails.

Don't think this can happen to you?  Well once upon a time Geocities was the MySpace of the day. Popularity on the Internet can be a fleeting friend.  So your best bet is to keep copies of your web content - photos, videos, documents - on your own PC so you are in control of them. Of course, that also means you need some backup of your own files but that discussion is for another day.