Web Apps, the New Lock-in, and the Opposite of Backup

27 Oct 2006 in General by Garrick

Over at MNteractive.com, we’ve been talking about how to close your MySpace account. Leaving sites like MySpace and Friendster should be straight forward - simply delete me. Disconnecting me from all my ‘friends’. No biggy. Not letting me do that is both a privacy issue and a Google juice problem.

Sites like YouTube and Flicker are slightly different - I put stuff I find valuable there, but I’ve got a local copy of all that. No biggy.

The biggy is with sites like Amazon, eBay, BaseCamp, Stikipad, browser-only email, and other collaborative sites where the assets only exist on the service’s servers. What happens to my assets when I want to leave?

I see that there was export functionality, but ‘this feature is currently unavailable’ - Darren Barefoot

Ouch.

In addition to regularly backing up the important information on your local machines - the same goes for all the web-only services, what do we call this…a ‘back-down’?

More:

“…I’m not spending lots of my time building anything in a system where it is locked up, I can’t take it out, and am at their mercy on rate hikes and such.” - Dave Slusher


Comment | Trackback URL Short Link:

Add a Comment


XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Related Entries




Creative Commons License
About Sitemap XHTML Sitemap XML
Wordpress theme is a heavily hacked version of "Modicus Remix" by Art Culture. Original by Upstart Blogger