Google Wants You to Be Able to Leave if You Want | WebProNews

Google Wants You to Be Able to Leave if You Want
By Chris Crum - Thu, 09/17/2009 - 10:49
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Starts Group for Easy Import/Export of Data from Products

Data portability is an important issue for users and businesses alike.
In this age of cloud computing, where so many web users have valuable
data hosted by web services, we can sometimes find ourselves vulnerable
to the will and occurrences of these services. Let's say for example,
Twitter is one of the key components to your marketing strategy, and one
of your main sources of traffic. When Twitter goes down, as it
frequently does, this can present quite a problem. Ever wished you could
access your tweets when Twitter was down? Comment here.

On the subject of Twitter, the company announced some changes to its
terms of service late last week. They tried to emphasize that users "own
their tweets." But do users really own them if they cannot access them
because Twitter is not working? What if you could export your Tweets
into Facebook, or into MySpace? It's not that one service is better than
the other. It's about simply having the freedom to take your data
wherever you want.

Google realizes the importance of this concept, which is why some
members of the company's team have gotten together and formed the Data
Liberation Front, a group that is dedicated to making Google's products
easier to get data in and out of. The group has also launched a website
at DataLiberation.org, where users of Google products can find
information about how to import and export data.

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have
to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of
technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus
all at once," says Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering
manager. "We believe that users - not products - own their data, and
should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product
without a hassle. We'd rather have loyal users who use Google products
because they're innovative - not because they lock users in."
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