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Facebook 2100
2100年的Facebook
This brings us to the question of Facebook's future.
我们现在要探讨一下Facebook的未来了。
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
我们没法确切地说Facebook能活多少年，因为我们没有类似的经验。大多数网站都是短时间内大火，然后慢慢地埋没于历史的尘埃之中，因而不妨假定Facebook最后的命运也会是如此。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.
按照这个场景，Facebook将在几年后开始失去市场份额，并且永远都不会恢复过来。Facebook的转折点——死人账户数超过活人账户数的那一天——将在2065年前后来临。
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.
不过也有可能不是如此，也许它会变得像TCP协议那样，成为其他基础设施的基石，这样用户们可就离不开它了。
If Facebook is with us for generations, then the crossover date could be as late as the mid-2100s.
如果Facebook能够历经数代人而不倒的话，那么它的转折点将会到22世纪中期才来临。
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.
不过这也不太现实，没有什么能够永恒存在，尤其是那些基于计算机技术的东西，急速更迭才是常态。在历史的长河里布满了那些10年前被认为将永远存在的网站和技术的遗骨。
It's possible the reality could be somewhere in between.5 We'll just have to wait and find out.
所以Facebook的命运很可能介于这两种情况之间。5我们只有静静等待才能知晓结果。
The fate of our accounts
账户的命运
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有财力能够将所有用户的页面和数据无限期地保存下去。活人用户产生的数据总是比死人用户要多的，6而且也只有那些活人的账户才会被经常访问。即使所有用户中死人（或不活跃）账户占了绝大多数，这也不会对总的数据存储支出产生太大影响。
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.
其实更重要的是我们用户的想法。我们要留着那些页面干啥？除非我们要求Facebook把页面删了，否则他们应该默认会永久备份所有数据。即使Facebook不那么做，也总会有那些数据收集公司这么做。
