When my daughters were born, my wife and I started a time capsule with the typical stuff: birth announcements, first baby pictures, newspapers from that day, you know…the usual stuff. Today, I wonder how time capsule’s may be differ given many of us don’t read newspapers anymore, or develop film, or even send actual old school birth announcements. Time capsules today and especially in the future may be entirely different given we store memories on hard drives, social media sites, bookmarking sites, etc.
We need a simple way to create a digital time capsule. Sure it exists in some ways on Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, etc, but the beauty of a time capsule is that it’s meant not to be looked at for years, until my daughters are married with their own kids or grandkids.
No doubt the Cloud is the best place to create and store a digital time capsule. Bookmark the news of the day, post a bunch of pictures and e-cards from relatives, whatever you choose to fill the capsule with in terms of digital memorabilia. The only hope being that the content will still be there in 20, 40, 60 years, but given companies desire (and legal obligation) to save everything, one would think it should be.
Think about this idea…you create a digital time capsule via some cloud service and apply a “do not open until June 22, 2060”. The site creates a username and password that you provide to your child, friend, whomever you choose (hopefully they don’t lose it). Then in 50 years, they can
visit the site (given the site still exists 🙂 and voila….a trip back in time.
Of course, there are a lot of what if’s and hopefully’s in this concept, but the experts can work those out.
Better yet, throw everything on a GoFlex drive and as interfaces change over the next 50 years, just switch out the adapter.
OK – I am kidding, but that concept does work in the short term.
What do you think? How would you create a digital time capsule?
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