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."

Kudos to them

[Lovedumplingx]

I didn't RTFA but the concept sounds quite tantalizing. Good for them.

Evolution hooks into Gmail would be sweet!

[chroot_james]

see subject.

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[Salvance]

Definitely, but not much to lose if a handful stop using it. If ADP stops using Salesforce, it would have serious implications to their bottom line. If you and I stop using GMail, they'll probably lose about $3/year in advertising revenue. That's the crux of the problem ... the risk is so much greater than the reward for companies that have complex systems with high revenue/client, while the reward and PR far outweighs the risk for companies like Google with hundreds of millions of customers and very little revenue/customer.

Better yet..

[Creepy Crawler]

I like this idea as a backup strategy, so that you can copy the "image" once a week so that you will NEVER lose your data.

This is a big gamble...

[greenguy]

...and it's going to pay off.

The technological aspect pales in comparison to the message that "The biggest reason to use us is that you don't have to," and its corollary, "People who use our services do so because they want to, not because we have them locked in."

Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[Kadin2048]

Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.

Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums are basically similar services. Flickr is a much bigger and more mature service, but Google's has more features and offers more control -- in particular, it implements some features that folks on Flickr have been begging for, literally for years in some cases.

(For example, Web Albums lets you upload photos to an "unlisted" album, which you can then send out special invitation emails out from; only people with the special URL in the email can access the photos. Flickr provides no such method of control; either your photos are public and open to the world, or they're open only to specific Flickr members you designate as 'friends' or 'family.' Basically, if you want to share photos only with your family, Flickr wants you to sign them all up for Yahoo IDs and Flickr memberships. Yeah, right.)

But once you have a few hundred photos up on Flickr, it's difficult to migrate off of. If you have them all carefully organized in iPhoto or something, then maybe you can do it, but if you've uploaded a few photos from here, a few from there, scattered across a dozen computers or emailed from mobile phones, there's no easy way to extract everything and migrate it to a different service. You're basically stuck with Yahoo, and the longer you stay with them, the more photos you upload ... you can see where it goes. (Although, 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, and file them according to photosets and other information.)

If the data was more easily transferable, then people could migrate from one service to the next. As adoption of Google's Web Albums is hobbled directly by the difficulty of moving off of Flickr, I saw this as one possible interpretation of the article's meaning.

But will they follow through with it?

[mr_stinky_britches]

Lets slow down for a second and ask ourselves
who is going to encourage everyone else to get on the data portability bandwagon?"

Well, whoever stands to gain the most from having users which can come and go as they please. I should acknowledge that I realize this kind of portability would be beneficial to both Google and web users in general. However, I don't see this going over so well with the likes of Yahoo and Hotmail (I don't want to pay an annual fee to prevent my account from being deleted or deactivated, dagnabit!). One could make a fairly good argument that google has some of the best-in-class services on the web, and they know it.

It will be interesting to see if/how they follow through on this. I would be much more comfortable using some of their services if I knew I could do an XML or equivalent type data dump and leave if I felt the need.

- Wi-Fizzle Research [wi-fizzle.com]

Now if only..

[mottie]

I could take my data and run TO google. I love their gmail hosted for domains, but when I can't import mail it's a bit of a pain in the ass... Yes I know I can use cheesy programs to transfer to gmail, but I like being able to sort by date.