Oct 27, 2009
Data Liberation
When the idea of web-based apps first started to look more viable there was an interesting debate within the open source community. The debate came down to the question of whether it mattered if you had the source-code of web hosted software. For the most part I think it does – especially if the developer wants faster development and more eyes looking at bugs/holes.
Having said that, freedom for a web-app means something completely different when it comes to the users data. This could not be more evident than with the recent news of hapless Microsoft destroying all data on T-Mobile Sidekick phones. After this news broke the tech-blogs were awash with damnation of “the cloud”. How could we ever trust anyone to store our data elsewhere? What were we thinking?
Well, we were thinking that its nice to always have our apps and our data available no matter where we are or what device we are using. We thought, its nice to have someone else provide storage for our ever-growing bits. But they are right in questioning our reliance on others to always get it right when it comes to protecting that data from rookie mistakes, changes in the direction of the app, or becoming evil.
So for the cloud to work, user must always have access to their data. That doesn’t mean the user simply gets to see their data in the app, that means that the user is at all times able to retrieve their data, and in a format that is transferable to other applications. Period. End of story. Anything less than that is a failure due to the reasons the Microsoft case so aptly showcased. Of course this means that the user must also be proactive in retrieving their data from time to time if it is truly important to them, but that has always been the case.
Its important to note that the largest purveyor of apps “in the cloud”, Google, has had a somewhat quiet campaign to provide this type of data retrieval for a while now. Called “Data Liberation” (and tracked at the Data Liberation Blog) they have been slowly making sure all their apps have some way for users to retrieve their data. The newest tool comes to Google Dos which has just added the “Convert, Zip, and Download” feature which allows you to easily grab some or all of your documents as a zip file (converted to whichever available format you would like). This is the most powerful of Google’s data retrieval tools so far and I hope all of their apps make it this easy (including Gmail which can do better than simply offering POP downloads). Still, it is good to point out Google proactively “not being evil” when so many folks currently attempt to disprove their famous motto.