We’ve all been there. Deleted a file—or an entire hard drive—and couldn’t recover the data. Sometimes, it’s not your fault. A virus sneaks past the firewall and corrupts your entire PC. Or your laptop bag walks away from you in a busy airport.
It happens. I once lost an entire week’s worth of web site changes, and on one insidious occasion, an entire site. It’s why we keep backups, or at least should. Assuming, of course, we actually can.
Not so much with social networking, as one of my LinkedIn connections recently discovered. With at least one popular social networking site, there is no option to restore deleted profiles, even if by accident.
A cautionary tale
John Pas is a colleague of mine and former boss from my agency days. The consummate sales pro, John keeps a hefty Rolodex and relies on years’ worth of relationship building to do his job. LinkedIn and John were, naturally, a perfect match. He’d built hundreds of connections on his profile, having sent and received many kind recommendations along the way.
So imagine my shock to see John had withdrawn his recommendation of me last night. “Geez,” I thought, “I know I owe the guy a beer or two but this is ridiculous!” As it happened, John was attempting to close an older, inactive LinkedIn profile of himself, and upon doing so, wiped out his current one.
Ouch.
John reports that he’s contacted LinkedIn several times today to no avail. Whether LinkedIn’s customer service can help him remains to be seen. While John’s profile may not qualify as a “mission critical app,” it will will cost him precious time and money to restore his profile should customer service be unable or unwilling to oblige. Like it or not, LinkedIn may be well within their right not to help John. After all, he is contractually obligated to hold LinkedIn harmless, even if it harms his own reputation.
A contract is a contract
It’s common to agree to a web site’s terms as a condition of membership. And I don’t mean to pick on LinkedIn. I know its terms well, which resemble the legalese of most every web site of its kind. LinkedIn has a stellar reputation (to my knowledge) and I remain a fan of its service. I do wish, though, that it had a way to back up my own profile.
Outside of LinkedIn’s boilerplate terms, the only other messaging I could find on the matter comes from its official FAQ:
Be aware that when we close an account, you will lose all of the information in that account, including profile information, connections, and recommendations.
I couldn’t quite find anything that explicitly said “yes, we can reopen your account” or “no, we cannot” so the above statement will have to do for now. And I pause: I have nearly 100 connections myself, a handful of generous recommendations, Q&As and so forth. I can and have always been able to export my connections into an address book format, but my guess is I’d have to re-connect with each and every connection (read: nuisance). I could, uh, save the raw XHTML output for each of my inbox items, miscellaneous notifications, status updates…the list goes on. And then having to re-up on any common-interest groups to which I belong? Again, ouch.
Facebook has a different take on this issue:
If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.
If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.
Better, I suppose. Us Facebook users aren’t completely up a certain creek without a paddle. Of course, this doesn’t help John’s situation with LinkedIn. Furthermore, Facebook’s definition of “closed” accounts is not without its share of scrutiny, particularly from privacy advocates. So, now what?
A portable proposition
I do believe that, in the short term, we should call on the social networking sites we use to offer remedial backups of our own profiles. I don’t think this is asking much. Exporting such data to an XML or comma delimited format is trivial at best. WordPress, the platform that powers this blog, offers such an export feature as an example. Heck, it even emails me my backup whenever I want. How nice is that?
In the long term, however, we need a smarter strategy. Enter social network portability, a quitely growing movement to enact industry standards and best practices for transfering data between social networks. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently spoke to this during this year’s SXSW keynote. The ongoing conversation is fairly technical, so if talk of hCard+XFN and interoperability makes your head hurt, well–it should. The end result should be a common and simple solution to avoid the very predicament that is giving our friend John his own headache.
As I woke this blog from its two-year slumber, I vowed to keep regular backups of the blog software, widgets, posts and comments. I think I’ll renew that vow. So should you—it’s your reputation, after all. Why not protect it?
Oh, and if you receive yet another invite to befriend or otherwise connect with someone with whom you already thought you had, give them the benefit of the doubt. Like John, they may need a beer, as well.
I’m back! After 5 emails to LinkedIn I finally received a response that my account was fully restored (along with my recommendations - hint, hint). The issue now is trying to remember which email I used for the old profile since they need that to delete it. Either way I’m not going to be making any changes for awhile after this situation.
Dino’s blog brings up some very good points to consider. One that I’m struggling with is what to do with the requests from my colleagues to join other network services like Pulse. I have put my time into LinkedIn as have many of my contacts so I’m wondering what value there is in being on more sites. If I could port my data I would probably do it, but since I can’t I’ll probably just stay with LinkedIn and try to get a few more free drinks out of it. Anyone need a recommendation? If you want to connect feel free to send me an invite at http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpas
One problem I see with social networking is there are too many social networks. First it was friendster, then myspace, then facebook, then linkedin, and on and on. Social networking needs a meebo so all our networks can be accessed from one place.
The more technology is user-friendly, the better off we all are!
John: Welcome back! Though I must admit, I was hoping your outage would drag out for a while. Think of all the fun we could’ve had protesting your plight on YouTube or something.
Well, not really. Always fun to scare PR people, though….
Kevin: You and John both have a point. Where does it end? I personally have profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook, which is plenty. I put up profiles on FastCompany.com and Freep.com (both of which have jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon) and never use them, because who has the time? And gosh darnit, having to set up all those profiles over and over again when I should be able to import one master profile, or something to that effect.
Still, there’s value to all of this. Provided the resources don’t outweigh the reward, I’ll stick with social networks. For now.
Here are a few of the responses also received through a LinkedIn Q&A:
“I have a full copy in pdf format. But it would be a nightmare to have to invite all of my contacts again.”
—Sheilah E.
“Overall, the situation would be a huge annoyance. HUGE. Bad enough trying to get back all your connections, but what about recommendations?”
—Andrew B.
“I would do nothing, and have one fewer social network to worry about.”
—Bill S.
Funny, reading this a year and a half since I first wrote this post, wishing I could retrieve my Google and Facebook accounts which were recently disabled due to some third-party chicanery. Self-fulfilling prophecy?