《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第121期:FACEBOOK之死亡國(2)
Facebook 2100
This brings us to the question of Facebook's future.
我們現在要探討一下Facebook的未來了。We don't have enough experience with social networks to say with any kind of certainty how long Facebook will last. Most websites have flared up and then gradually declined in popularity, so it's reasonable to assume Facebook will follow that pattern.4
我們沒法確切地說Facebook能活多少年，因爲我們沒有類似的經驗。大多數網站都是短時間內大火，然後慢慢地埋沒於歷史的塵埃之中，因而不妨假定Facebook最後的命運也會是如此。4
In that scenario, where Facebook starts losing market share later this decade and never recovers, Facebook's crossover date-the date when the dead outnumber the living-will come sometime around 2065.
按照這個場景，Facebook將在幾年後開始失去市場份額，並且永遠都不會恢復過來。Facebook的轉折點——死人賬戶數超過活人賬戶數的那一天——將在2065年前後來臨。But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.
不過也有可能不是如此，也許它會變得像TCP協議那樣，成爲其他基礎設施的基石，這樣用戶們可就離不開它了。If Facebook is with us for generations, then the crossover date could be as late as the mid-2100s.
如果Facebook能夠歷經數代人而不倒的話，那麼它的轉折點將會到22世紀中期纔來臨。That seems unlikely. Nothing lasts forever, and rapid change has been the norm for anything built on computer technology. The ground is littered with the bones of websites and technologies that seemed like permanent institutions ten years ago.
不過這也不太現實，沒有什麼能夠永恆存在，尤其是那些基於計算機技術的東西，急速更迭纔是常態。在歷史的長河裏佈滿了那些10年前被認爲將永遠存在的網站和技術的遺骨。It's possible the reality could be somewhere in between.5 We'll just have to wait and find out.
所以Facebook的命運很可能介於這兩種情況之間。5我們只有靜靜等待才能知曉結果。The fate of our accounts
賬戶的命運Facebook can afford to keep all our pages and data indefinitely. Living users will always generate more data than dead ones,6 and the accounts for active users are the ones that will need to be easily accessible. Even if accounts for dead (or inactive) people make up a majority of their users, it will probably never add up to a large part of its overall infrastructure budget.
Facebook有財力能夠將所有用戶的頁面和數據無限期地保存下去。活人用戶產生的數據總是比死人用戶要多的，6而且也只有那些活人的賬戶纔會被經常訪問。即使所有用戶中死人（或不活躍）賬戶佔了絕大多數，這也不會對總的數據存儲支出產生太大影響。More important will be our decisions. What do we want for those pages? Unless we demand that Facebook deletes them, they will presumably, by default, keep copies of everything forever. Even if they don't, other data-vacuuming organizations will.
其實更重要的是我們用戶的想法。我們要留着那些頁面幹啥？除非我們要求Facebook把頁面刪了，否則他們應該默認會永久備份所有數據。即使Facebook不那麼做，也總會有那些數據收集公司這麼做。
