Boing Boing, mobile blogger Russell Buckley and community evangelist Tomi Ahonen picked up the TextAmerica announcement and placed it the context of an ongoing debate about the importance of being good custodians of digital memories.

Boing Boing’s post features some pretty horrible scary stories. TA user Noah Lockwood says this:

“My friends and I all have TextAmerica blogs so we can chronicle our trips and get-togethers - they’re mainly for each other, though they’re technically public, and our experience has generally been pretty good with Textamerica.

"Not anymore. After sharing our outrage with TA via email amongst ourselves, some of my friends added posts to their moblogs protesting the decision, changed their profile images to protest images, and linked to the Boing Boing post. The posts were removed, and now their moblogs are GONE.”

From “TextAmerica - Responsible Curators of Digital Memories?” on MobHappy:

“So the problem here is that their service has a deep emotional meaning to their customers. They’re not announcing that car part 357 will be replaced with 457 next month. Or that a bank’s interest rate will be reduced by .25%. They’re announcing that they’re going to delete people’s digital memories that are stored on their system.”

Tomi Ahonen is kind of insensed:

This is HORRIBLE. Even in an analogue world this is very bad. First inviting customers to join and deposit their memories onto this service with the promise to become the depository for those digital memories, then to even CONTEMPLATE deleting them. Why could they not archive these for their customers? Storage is not that expensive today?