Capturing my Facebook Profile

Have you given much thought about how to preserve the social media you use every day?  There’s no telling how the stuff we put online today will be made available, if ever, to our descendents.  While the National Archives is grabbing all of our public tweets, if yours aren’t public they may be lost to time.

One of the things I have started to do is capture screen shots of Facebook profiles of my family members, myself included.  This is especially neat to do on unique occasions such as someone’s birthday, prom, Christmas, graduation, etc.  I simply take a screen shot and paste it into Photoshop and save the file as a JPG.  I name the file with the date and a description, such as 20110830_FacebookProfile_JessicaGreen.jpg.

This is also a good way to capture your family member’s Profile information at a point in time, especially for the younger generation.  Don’t forget to copy the text and paste it into a document to go along with the JPG, that way it will be searchable later.  It’s fun to look back at the status changes over time, like when your nephew is “Single” and then “In a Relationship” and then “Single” and then “In a Relationship” and eventually “Married.”

I’d love to hear your tips on how to capture today’s technology for tomorrow’s genealogists.  What do you suggest?