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."

Comments

Kudos to them

[Lovedumplingx]

I didn't RTFA but the concept sounds quite tantalizing. Good for them.

Evolution hooks into Gmail would be sweet!

[chroot_james]

see subject.

Re:Evolution hooks into Gmail would be sweet!

[Salvance]

Already does ... gmail has a POP3 server, so you can just download into Evolution (unless you want the actual GMail GUI in Evolution, which seems rather bizarre since the Evolution interface is already pretty "sweet").

Difficult for more complex data?

[Salvance]

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.

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[chroot_james]

just because a service is given away for free does not mean it's not profitable. google has a lot to loose if people stop using their services...

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[Salvance]

Definitely, but not much to lose if a handful stop using it. If ADP stops using Salesforce, it would have serious implications to their bottom line. If you and I stop using GMail, they'll probably lose about $3/year in advertising revenue. That's the crux of the problem ... the risk is so much greater than the reward for companies that have complex systems with high revenue/client, while the reward and PR far outweighs the risk for companies like Google with hundreds of millions of customers and very little revenue/customer.

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[DragonWriter]

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.

They don't stand as much to lose from any one customer leaving, but they face as much of a problem as anyone else if the same percentage of their customers choose to leave. What Google is gambling is that, if they have a good product, the reduction in the disincentive to give it a whirl that comes from people knowing up front that if they decide to leave, it will be painless will gain them more customers than easing out migration will lose them. And also that someone that has a good experience leaving one Google service may be more likely to try another Google service.

for the "omg you google fanboys" people

[bunions]

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.

Re:for the "omg you google fanboys" people

[Headcase88]

I certainly like Google but that's bullshit. Eric is tactful with his words; surely all of this data portability stuff has an additional purpose, like, say, helping bringing valuable data in to Google's services? MS Office is the incumbent here, so of course Google wants to make it easy to transfer data between MS Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, for example.

Not saying it's a bad thing, not saying Google isn't a great company, but I wouldn't take any claims made by x about how great x is at face value.

Re:for the "omg you google fanboys" people

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that what's good for the customer is good for the company? What a strange concept; you must be full of shit.

Better yet..

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Obvious first steps..?

[CdBee]

IMAP for Gmail, where Tags become Folders dynamically. Send as Emailed DOC/XLS/ODW/ODS for Google Docs

Re:Obvious first steps..?

[slazar]

Instead of emailed documents for Google Docs, enable WebDAV. Apple's dot mac service does this. Apple calls it iDisk. Microsoft calls it web folders.

This is a big gamble...

[greenguy]

...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."

Go on, take the money and run

[hoy74]

doot doot doot

API for Contacts?

[jj00]

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).

Re:API for Contacts?

[cucucu]

you can download the as a .cvs file

POP does this, sort of.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Moo

[Chacham]

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.

Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[Kadin2048]

Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.

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 ... 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.)

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.

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[maxume]

The big Y is pretty open. Interestingly, that behavior increased markedly when they acquired, of all things, Flickr. For example:

http://developer.yahoo.com/flickr/
http://www.flickrbits.com/
http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm

That doesn't help you get your data into something else, but out isn't really an issue.

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[dmd]

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

"Maybe"?

Flickr is one of the most open and programmable sites out there. Check out http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ -- absolutely everything you can do at Flickr, you can do programatically.

There are thousands of third party utilities that operate over Flickr photos, including many that will download all your photos along with all the metadata. There's even a perl module for it, Net::Flickr::Backup.

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[jeffehobbs]

There's even a perl module for it, Net::Flickr::Backup.

Yeah, I don't know why my mom couldn't find that.

~jeff

But will they follow through with it?

[mr_stinky_britches]

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

Re:But will they follow through with it?

[DragonWriter]

One could make a fairly good argument that google has some of the best-in-class services on the web, and they know it.

And openness as far as transfers out as well as in is a good way to underline that they have the best-in-class services, because it makes services not similarly open suspect ("why are they trying to lock me in?")

Can't be the only one

[QuantumFTL]

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...

Clarification

[Wills]

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.

Now if only..

[mottie]

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.

Great, now if only they would let me **delete** it

[VidEdit]

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.

Joel has a good article on this

[grotgrot]

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?

Re:Great, now if only they would let me **delete**

[VidEdit]

"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.