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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."
i'll take this post and run
?giS
I didn't RTFA but the concept sounds quite tantalizing. Good for them.
see subject.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
It's applaudable that Google is doing this, although not at all surprising. But most of the user data they store is pretty simple (spreadsheets, e-mails, etc.), so making it portable is relatively easy. This is far more difficult to do for real business data, like hosted CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce). Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable ... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
next time you post some nonsense about how "all the slashdot people idolize google for some reason," this would be a good example of why we like them.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Just another thing google is trying to do to impove its image, they always wanted to look like the good big corp, and its working, (i think)
This deserves at least a +1 insightful.
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
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.
IMAP for Gmail, where Tags become Folders dynamically. Send as Emailed DOC/XLS/ODW/ODS for Google Docs
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Google just wants everyone elses data in a standard format so they can steal everyone else's customers. The way google stores their information is just a ploy to get everyone on the same page.
...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."
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
doot doot doot
So Hotmail will allow to redirect e-mails to make easier the change to another e-mail service?
How about an API so I can access my Contacts?
Can someone send this article to Palm? I'm sick of having to export my Palm contacts as vcards and import them into Yahoo (Yes Yahoo - Gmail only accepts csv).
You could always connect via POP and download your GMail to a traditional mail system of your choice periodically.
I'm not sure what happens the first time you connect, because it's been a while that I've been using it, but if I read my email via the web interface (say at work, or at a friend's house) those same messages will still be downloaded via POP the next time I connect it. Even if I've already read/responded/archived those messages (actually it downloads sent messages, too). So this results in me having two copies of every message, one in my local mailfile on my computer, and another in Gmail's repository.
You might have to do something the first time around if you want it to download ALL your stored mail (I don't think it will automatically transfer all your messages the first time or anything), but once you get it working, it's not a bad system. If Google went out of business tomorrow, I wouldn't lose all my hundreds of megabytes of old mail, and if my house got swept away by a tidal wave into the sea, I wouldn't lose it either. (Of course, if Google went out of business AND my house got swept out to sea, then I'd be fucked. But hey, what's life without risk?)
The POP connection is still a little disappointing after being used to IMAP mail (please, Google, please!), but it's better than any other service that I've played with. It beats the hell out of ISP-provided email, and I'd rather have a gmail.com address than a yahoo.com or (gag) hotmail.com one. Gmail doesn't really have any tech cachet to it anymore, but at least it doesn't say "internet ghetto" like Hotmail does.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
John Doe Vs Mr. Google Man:
Judge: John Doe, what is your claim against the defendant?
John Doe: Mr Google Man said my data would be portable. When i asked him where my data was, he said "search me".
Judge: Mr. Google Man, did you indeed say "search me".
Mr. Google Man: Yes sir, i did.
Judge: And why? Did you not have the data in a portable fashion?
Mr. Google Man: Yes, i did. When i said "search me", i mean to go to the google home page, and search for it.
Judge: And why should he search for it?
Mr. Google Man: The new privatedata.google.com (beta) has easy access to everyone's private information, and he could access it more easily there than anywhere else.
Judge: Do you mean to say that people's private data, for example, mine, is easily availabe?
Mr. Google Man: Yes sir. The Google Man can!
John Doe: I thought the it was the Candy Man that can, er could, can could, yes could.
Judge: The Candy Man was arrested a few years ago for inappropriate relations with a child.
Mr. Google Man: John Doe is the Candy Man.
Judge: Is he now?
Mr. Google Man: Yes sir. A simple search on gimmethegoodsonmyneighbor.google.com (beta) will show that during the investigation most blogs thought he was him.
Judge: Blogs??
Mr. Google Man: You're honor, i move that we drop this case. Jusst like you dropped marijuana right before you came on the bench.
Judge: Strike that from the record!
Judge: Motion to Dismiss accepted. John Doe will pay the court costs.
Have you read my journal today?
I wonder if business people will start to put some of their data in this system before crossing the border into, or out of, the US. Sure, it won't replace the laptop they confiscated from you, but at least you'll still have your data. Who knows, maybe someone at the conference/work site you're going to has an extra PC that you could use. Just a thought.
Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.
... 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.)
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
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Thank you, captain obvious! If you already knew that it was going to pay off, it wouldn't be much of a gamble now, would it. And then you attempt to provide some kind of geometry type of proof reasoning that it will pay off. So you're either wrong with your proof or wrong about it being a gamble. If I had mod points I'd give you an overrated.
I can't be the only person on here that thought that Google's CEO was going to run off with our data or something from the title...
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Google - if you are so bold, let's see you provide IMAP access to gmail.
What is this concept of letting customers^Wconsumers switch from your product?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
To clarify: Google does not consider the search histories of its users to be part of what they call "data" they are talking about, so they will not send you your entire search history and erase their copy if you tell them you want to move all your data to another place.
Scroogle
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.
I think Google should provide a Linux box with root access to each surfer.
The most basic web based interface would be a AJAX based command line over https, so you can login as root.
A more sophisticated one would be using a GUI-ish web application.
Finally, when you are at your computer and not in an airport public terminal or internet cafe, you can use special purpose client software for remote desktop access.
All your gmail's attachments, docs, or spreadsheet you edit would end up on your computer, and could be edited with remote desktop software too.
If they want they can add ads in the desktop. Nor does it matter to me if they charge for the service. In the latter case the model could be as in Amazon's EC2, a few cents for CPU hour, GB transmitted/stored. If the computer is iddle it is hibernated and stored, and you are not charged for it.
And if you want to leave you can download your image or have a DVD mailed to you.
Making a user's application data portable is nice. I'd much rather be able to take the secret data that Google has amassed on me away and toss it in the bin. Google doesn't just know everything you've searched for, they know what you click on and every site with google ads that you've visited. Plus they read your gmail and all the data from their on-line apps and keep that information forever.
Give the users some real power. Let them decide how Google uses their data.
PS,
Yes, I do know that many SD readers use proxies and delete cookies and such but this does not make my point any less significant for most users. I'm not in the camp that thinks that users should have to be programers to have any privacy rights.
Of course this is a great thing for us, the consumers. I just think of why Google would do this beyond it naturally sounding like a positive thing. Google has little to lose now as one post mentioned and their information is easy to share. Other companies may follow this trend because we, the consumer, expect to easily migrate data from one provider to the next and this is when Google can really tae advantage. As Google grows, buys more companies, and expands product offerings it seems it would be convenient if they could capture new customers easily because they suggested that industries move towards an easily transferable structure. Google, being the new comer to each service they begin to provide would stand to gain the most form this policy. Conspiracy theory complete.
That Guy
Also, were the stage littered with chairs after he'd finished speaking?
#DeleteChrome
Will Google delete my emails? My documents? My search history? No, no and no. That's where their money come from. Targetted advertising based on invading my privacy.
This sounds like something I have been talking to my clients about for years.
They should see if people they are thinking of doing business with have provided an exit strategy for them should things not work out. A company/person that put you first would be happy to do so.
So many only want to provide an entrance strategy. They want to get you easily into their world and then lock your hip in.
all the best,
drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954
Sayings
A NaNoWriMo novel in the making (copyleft type license)
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Interesting, I didn't even know those settings were there. I'll have to go into the web interface and poke around to see what they've added new in there.
You don't lose a whole lot in moving from the web interface to a local mailreader; Google's spam headers that it uses for handing still come through in your downloaded messages, so you can set your local spamfilters to take advantage of them. (Though you might want to use with some care; I have servers that email me logs at night, and Gmail has always perceived these as 'spammy' because of the lack of DNS MX records for the originating domains.)
All in all, being able to check email through the web interface yet still have it all download and sync up with my local mailreader (I use Apple Mail) works pretty well for me. There is some stuff that could definitely be improved with Gmail, but in general I don't have too many complaints. They really raised the bar for free email, and I think everyone (even if you use one of the other services) has benefited from that in some way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You are confused. Whether or not they retain it has nothing to do with data portability. All data portability means in this case is that you could download all your emails in some common format and then import it to another service. It would keep you from being tied to google.
Just Sayin'
I thought that google laid claim to everything stored on their resources?
is this just pretend "your data", or so I actually own my own stuff when stored on google filesystems?
Joel has a very good article on this at joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html written several years ago.
I wonder if Google will forward your gmail address if you decide to quit?
Honestly, I don't understand how the mere collection or processing of this data is a problem. It's only a problem if the wrong people get access to it. Every day, your actions and movements are recorded on security cameras, your grocery store purchases are recorded on the club card, everywhere you go with your credit card is logged in some database somewhere, every time you fly a record is generated, every time you buy anything at Target (even with cash) a record is generated of what was purchased and when, and every time you send an email (regardless of ISP) a log of that message is created and stored on the server.
Why should people be more wary of Google than they are of any other link in this chain? There is SO MUCH data available on almost every adult in modern society, scattered across systems all around the world, that it doesn't make sense to target anyone unless there are serious or repeated security lapses.
Moreover, how is privacy violated by a mechanical record? Any of these tasks might be observed by someone--it's not like we live in a super-secretive society, spread miles apart. Don't get me wrong, I'm fervently opposed to the collection and human review of this data, and I don't believe people should have access to the records except as required by law, but the automated mechanical floodgates are wide open and the river is loose. Who cares what some computer uses to process information, so long as it's just a computer observing the data?
The killer app of flickr for me is, quite simply, that flickr does not use a "storage space" concept. They only use an "upload limit". The $25/year 6gig Picasa may sound like a lot, but if you upload your 2 gigs a month on your $25/year flickr account, you've filled an entire Picasa in three months.
For snapshot moms, 6 gigs of temporary storage is a pittance. I can shoot 6 gigs in a day, easily, and even if I only keep one percent, that's still going to run up against the Picasa storage limit eventually. (With flickr, I may have to throttle the uploads or send them up in slightly reduced form, but I don't hit a brick wall.)
Actually, when I first saw Flickr, I was astounded that it wasn't a Google product. I always thought that they seriously missed the boat in letting Yahoo scoop it up. It's just very
Flickr, generally speaking, is the superior service in all but a few ways, but those few ways -- mainly security/control of who can view one's own photos -- are pretty important to a lot of average 'family photographers.' I wouldn't be comfortable, for instance, putting photos from a family gathering on Flickr, particularly if they contained shots of other people's children; Google's service makes sharing a set of photos with a limited group of people trivial.
Either Flickr is going to add better privacy controls and invitation-only capacities, thereby closing the gap with Google, or Google is going to remove the upload limit and generally spruce things up to make it more appealing to serious photographers. Right now, you have Google appealing more to casual/family shooters, and Flickr a much better choice for hobbyist/prosumer volume photographers.
I guess the real question is whether the two will converge, or diverge completely in order to capture different markets.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Isn't the closed Office file formats one of the things that keeps Office totally and completely locked into the worldwide corporation? I'm really thinking more of .xls than .doc, but they're both barely compatible between different machines to say nothing of different office suites or even types of application. Methinks this is another Google strike against Microsoft ...
And on a more general note: data portability barely works WITHIN companies - to say nothing of making an effort to allowing customers to manipulate the data sold to them.
Please mod parent up: +1 hilarious
I was invited to the GMail For Domains beta, but was unable to participate because, just like with the main GMail service, there's no way to get your existing mail INTO it other than just forwarding all your messages one at a time to gmail ... and doing that means you lose all your date information.
"Moreover, how is privacy violated by a mechanical record? "
Basic rule of privacy and security: The only way to guarantee that records aren't released into the wild is not to collect them in the first place.
"Who cares what some computer uses to process information, so long as it's just a computer observing the data?"
As long as the data exists it can be demanded by the government through National Security Letters and by corporations and individuals in lawsuits, including divorce suits. So, yes, the very existence of this data pool is a privacy risk. Or there could be a security breach like the AOL "anonymized" search data release or a hack. All data collections are potential risks. The more personalized the data, the greater the risk.
"Why should people be more wary of Google than they are of any other link in this chain?"
Why should we be less wary? The all have potential pitfalls. This thread happens to be about Google in specific.
Basic concept of privacy: objects can't violate it, only people can. Does your blender invade your privacy? Do your walls? Security cameras don't violate privacy unless they're being used by a person to watch you--your rights can only be infringed upon by a person or corporate entity (a person under the law). Mechanical processes don't qualify for person status and therefore by definition can't violate privacy.
"As long as the data exists it can be demanded by the government through National Security Letters and by corporations and individuals in lawsuits, including divorce suits. So, yes, the very existence of this data pool is a privacy risk."
First of all, I said "as long as it's just a computer observing the data" so this comment is a non sequitur. That aside, the risk of something does not a violation make. The existence of guns constitutes a risk to human life. The use of combustion engines represents a safety risk. The very existence of cameras could be a privacy risk. None of these things are illegal--they're restricted. Likewise, there are restrictions on data collection and standards for its security. Again, the existence of such data is no problem; it's merely the management of it that poses a threat.
The rhetorical question "why should people be more wary of Google" was meant to call into question the so-called 'privacy battle' with web data collection in comparison to other forms of data collection which have existed for decades and not gone away. Essentially what I'm trying to say is, how is this different from security cameras and credit cards and ISP logging?
there's much more to making the data portable then giving people the freedom to leave, it's just another reason to sign up in my opinion...
For instance where is the link (or the navigation instructions) on where to download a tarball of all my gmail account? Or anything else?
Lots of talk in this article, no actual info. Im sure its 'coming soon'.
I recently had my company switch to this and it works pretty well. my boss is especially glad to have something that offers Email and Calendar (tho not as well as Outlook or Evolution). For small businesses who don't want to store their own data I would definitely suggest this service. Of course there is no easy way to sync google calendar with an offline client. but hopefully in the future?
Open Source and Computer-aided Design (http://ossandcad.blogspot.com)
Eh, it was apple bashing, I had the troll coming, but totally worth it.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?