However, those home pages were one of a very few ways to get to know your virtual friends better. To publish such a page, you would have signed up with a free home page provider<\/em>. Some of the more famous ones were Geocities and Xoom. You probably haven\u2019t heard of those, and there is a good reason for that: Both collapsed after the first dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. I had a home page on both, and the only reason I can show you a screenshot today is that I bothered to back up those pages on my hard drive.<\/p>\n In other circumstances, this delightful story of my early Internet life could have vanished completely. But the lesson about services coming and going is still relevant. Take Twitter \u2014 the company recently shut down its video-related spin-off Vine<\/a>. The shutdown was announced several months in advance, so content creators had time to do what I did years ago \u2014 download or move their creations elsewhere.<\/p>\n Obviously, this issue is particularly important for artistic people (cutting them off from their own creations can be brutal<\/a> \u2014 or very brutal<\/a>). But even if what you create is something as simple as your vacation photos or a compilation of funny things your children said, you probably want to make sure those creations won\u2019t vanish if, say, Facebook decides to go out of business in a few years.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s get back to my early Internet life. Fast-forward five years and everyone is fond of blogs<\/em>. Tech-savvy people create stand-alone sites for their blogs; however, the easiest way to start your own blog is to create an account on a dedicated blogging site. I selected a popular-back-then service called LiveJournal and spent a few years writing book\/movie\/restaurant reviews for a few dozens of my friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n LiveJournal undertook a few significant transformations, and it\u2019s not that popular nowadays; however, it still exists and works in more or less the same way. Despite that, you won\u2019t be able to read my older posts on the platform because one day in late 2000s I used LiveJournal\u2019s convenient bulk-editing interface to set all of my posts\u2019 visibility to \u201cfriends-only.\u201d<\/p>\n So unless you\u2019re one of my very old LJ friends, you can\u2019t see that content anymore. I restricted viewing after realizing that a completely unintended audience was reading and reacting to my posts. It varied wildly, from new business partners to strangers who apparently admired my ramblings, but they had one thing in common: I didn\u2019t want to interact with them in the context of my old, personal blog. This lesson was not a hard one \u2014 there was no reputational or other damage \u2014 but it could be different for some people. Serious threats or bullying over a single tweet are not uncommon nowadays, and heated arguments and breakups over a partner\u2019s social media actions happen as well<\/a>.<\/p>\n Who owns your #digital<\/a> #memories<\/a>? Is there a way for the answer to be YOU? https:\/\/t.co\/3h25qAM8hq<\/a> #SocMe<\/a> #SocialMedia<\/a> #SMM<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/HG5eMOgPkT<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Kaspersky (@kaspersky) December 22, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Some](\"https:\/\/media.kasperskydaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/103\/2017\/01\/06020958\/ffforget-sym-homepage.png\")
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