What happens when a Google Reader or Posterous shut down, stranding users who have have enormous amounts of time as well as much time invested in them? Techcrunch explores this, saying we need to insure data portability for our cloud-based data.
Users who fawned over an app’s creation, contributing their time and energy into making New-Fangled SOLOMO Photo Sharing InstaBot Checkin Whatnot the “next big thing,” don’t get a portion of the final paycheck when the exit is good. And when things go badly, they sometimes don’t even get to say goodbye. The app just disappears.
Google Reader made it easy to export RSS subscriptions and import them into another feed reader. Facebook and Twitter allow data to be exported but then what do you do with it? Only a skilled programmer could import it into something useful.
Social networking needs open standards with data portability baked into it.
Our (web) castles are made of sand, and the tides are regular. Can we start taking data portability more seriously please?