Google CEO — Take Your Data and Run

BobB writes to tell us that Google is promising to make the data they store for end users more portable and is urging other companies to do the same. From the article: "Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle, Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco."

Difficult for more complex data?

[Salvance]

It's applaudable that Google is doing this, although not at all surprising. But most of the user data they store is pretty simple (spreadsheets, e-mails, etc.), so making it portable is relatively easy. This is far more difficult to do for real business data, like hosted CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce). Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable ... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.

Re:Evolution hooks into Gmail would be sweet!

[Salvance]

Already does ... gmail has a POP3 server, so you can just download into Evolution (unless you want the actual GMail GUI in Evolution, which seems rather bizarre since the Evolution interface is already pretty "sweet").

Re:API for Contacts?

[cucucu]

you can download the as a .cvs file

Clarification

[Wills]

To clarify: Google does not consider the search histories of its users to be part of what they call "data" they are talking about, so they will not send you your entire search history and erase their copy if you tell them you want to move all your data to another place.

Joel has a good article on this

[grotgrot]

Joel has a very good article on this at joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html [joelonsoftware.com] written several years ago.

I wonder if Google will forward your gmail address if you decide to quit?

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[maxume]

The big Y is pretty open. Interestingly, that behavior increased markedly when they acquired, of all things, Flickr. For example:

http://developer.yahoo.com/flickr/ [yahoo.com]
http://www.flickrbits.com/ [flickrbits.com]
http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm [greggman.com]

That doesn't help you get your data into something else, but out isn't really an issue.

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[dmd]

maybe there's some way you could come up with a shell script that would parse Flickr's URLs and download the full-resolution photos

"Maybe"?

Flickr is one of the most open and programmable sites out there. Check out http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ [flickr.com] -- absolutely everything you can do at Flickr, you can do programatically.

There are thousands of third party utilities that operate over Flickr photos, including many that will download all your photos along with all the metadata. There's even a perl module for it, Net::Flickr::Backup.