An article in Wired Magazine details the plight of the endangered species otherwise known as the high school yearbook. Yearbooks remain the bricks-and-mortar choice of the masses by far, but MyYearbook.com grosses $40,000 per month after a mere year of existence. Not too shabby for a teenage startup company:

[T]he teenage siblings who created MyYearbook.com, Catherine and David Cook of Stillman, New Jersey, are confident their generation will trust the internet with their school memories.

“We just think yearbooks are obsolete,” said Catherine Cook, 16. “If you think about it, all you’re going to do with it is put it on the shelf and never really look at it.”

Students have access to multimedia and interactive components that old-fashioned yearbooks can’t offer, including a place for creating polls and storing music and videos.

Here’s a thought – why not save yourself the headache of dealing with a new signup process and just use a blog post to link everyone’s MySpace.com profiles? Yeah, that’s the ticket! Then you could see who is friends with Tommy Lee and whatnot.

Something tactile occurs when one flips open their own yearbook and runs their fingers down the glossy pages. The scribblings inside the covers document the authentic autograph and “Luv Ya Babe” from the heartthrob that used to flirt shamelessly with you after English class – the same hunk that never asked out out in highschool – the same hunk that you run across on Match.com ten years later, go out on a date with, and then “forgot” to return his three phone calls for a follow-up date. Paybacks are hell, baby.

Furthermore, data is vulnerable online, and what would classmates do if certain Islamofascists decided to take down Most-Likely-To-Succeed’s profile? I shudder to think. Actually, now that I think about it, I have no earthly idea where my high school yearbooks might be. That certainly speaks to the institution of yearbooks.