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Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data
Several sources are reporting that The Data Liberation Front, a new engineering group within Google, is trying make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They have already "liberated" about half of Google's offerings (including Blogger and Gmail) and have plans to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs in the near future. "In a blog post this morning, Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy to explain why the company sees this is an important step: 'Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all. Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective.'"
So the idea is that making it easier to leave google makes you more likely to stay with google?
I need to try this on my girlfriend!
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
This is an even-numbered, "Do No Evil" week.
Watch out next week though.
This is one of THE major complaints about AOL. Easy to get data in, impossible to get out.
Just last month I was asked to assist someone to get all their contacts (1,500 or so) out of AOL's mail system. There is no export feature, nor any third-party tool to do it. AOL's official answer is to print it out for a backup.
I called AOL's support, and after several rounds of phone-tree hell, got a tech who told me flat out "We don't do that. Good luck!"
I ended up writing a script that parsed the XML-like output of their "print" function. Print to screen, save to file, parse with Perl. It hoses up the contact lists, which are included and just end up creating duplicates. They don't output as lists at all.
Still, it was marginally better than hiring someone to retype it all by hand.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This is both the big advantage (for providers) and disadvantage (for customers) with SaaS-type "cloud" services: data lock-in. Its interesting that Google believes that they can compete enough on quality that lock-in is no longer an advantage to them because it scares away more potential customers than it traps.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Guy 1: Are you with the Data Liberation Front?
Guy 2: No, we're with the Liberation Front for Data!
Guy 1: Oh, well at least you aren't with the Front for Data Liberation!
I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker. Right now the 'community' adds raw data like streets & locations but 'only' get back PNGs with colors representing streets and locations. Granted this is enough for most people. But Openstreetmap has been doing similar work and allows users access to the raw data, resulting in totally different uses than just simple PNG-maps. It would be awesome to tap into the raw mapmaker data and combine it with raw openstreetmap data for for instance routing, vector based maps for mobiles (smaller!) etc
No way dude, they wouldn't do something evil like that. I really take my stuff and they keep the low-quality copy!
I am SO sick of Google. They are giving every corporation a bad name by being so unevil.
Damn capitalist hippies!
It's getting where an evil mega-corp can't make a bazillion bucks anymore.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I've been looking for a good way to get a bunch of old email out of my yahoo account for a while without paying for a premium account... this actually looks like a good option! Judging from the screenshots I can import my email into gmail and then grab it via POP/IMAP.. now off to try it :)
Even for a minority member of the market it is to their advantage. Advertising that it is easier to move (and scaring consumers that other vendors/landlords "lock you in") gets you customers. This either means you end up with more customers, or you force everyone in the industry to add the ability to move. If they choose the latter, then you can compete on features and be able to easily pull customers from other vendors.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Doesn't he mean, "You wouldn't choose to enter into that lease in the first place."
I.e. people won't use Google products until they can avoid lock-in.
The analogy, as with most analogies, is useful for precisely the things it was designed to be useful for, and is misleading when extended.
There is a legitimate fear of Google's tools that you can't apply any other tools to your data. These guys are trying to fix that problem.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
Analogies can be useful to explain things, but they're rarely valid for actually proving things. They're useful for proofs only when the analogy is so precise that it's no easier to understand or manipulate than the original thing.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html/
Rick Moen . . .
INOLJ-OOW2.0C (Is Not On LiveJournal Or Other Web 2.0 Cults)
It's worth the read.
So you can get your data out when you want to move to different sites/applications.
What about getting your data out if Google decides to stop the site/app, decides to stop the "Liberation Group", decides to delete your data from it's systems or somehow has to stop business.
This "Liberation Group" thing simply ensures you can get your data only when you least need to.
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Dude, did you know the government puts fluoride in the drinking water? It's true!
I think often people confuse "altruism" with "long term self-interest," and that may be the issue Google is considering here. In the short term, you can make it hard for tenants to move out, and maybe gain a little bit of rent that you would not have otherwise gotten. However, people talk and, in the long term, behavior like that can lose you potential customers. You will be forced to drop your rent in order to keep your units full.
(This relates to the best description of "business ethics" I've heard: Ethical business requires that you balance the needs of and try to act in the best interest of your owners, employees and customers. Otherwise, in the long run, you will find yourself without capital, labor, or revenue. Thus, business ethics is about long term self-interest, not some kind of abstract altruism. Sometimes the "long run" takes a really long time, encouraging people to risk unethical behavior, of course.)
Making it easier to leave Google applications helps grow your potential customer base in the future (such as those who are wary of lock in), at the risk of losing current customers who are unhappy with your service. That is a motivation well-rooted in self-interest, as long as you think your product is better than everyone else's.
Landlords would want to make it easier for tenants to move out because then it's easier to get tenants to move in. You'd get more people interested in being tenants, if they knew they wouldn't have to leave all their stuff behind when they left. This increased demand for rental spaces means that existing capacity is more likely to be filled, and new capacity built as demand makes it profitable.
But it's a little much to expect people to follow a clumsy tenant/landlord analogy when a perfectly good car analogy can be made.
This is like you rent a truck for a big shopping trip, but when you return the truck you also have to hand over all the stuff you bought. The Google Data Liberation Group is working to ensure that you get to keep all the stuff you bought on your excursion, and you'll even be able to put it in the back of a competitor's truck if you decide to rent another one.
Except Google has old-tymey magickal replicator technology, and they kept a copy of all your stuff, and detailed records of how and where you bought it, so that they can make sure that you're bombarded with ads for products and services related to what you bought.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It raises risks, though: not only do you have to think your product is better than everyone else's, but that it'll stay that way indefinitely. I think a lot of companies aren't that confident that, sometime in the future, someone else won't come along with a better---maybe even much better---product. Then they're suddenly out of business, unless they've made it harder for people to quickly switch. If they did make it hard to switch, though, they'll have residual business for years after being obsoleted, from locked-in "legacy" customers.
Depending on how you value risks, it might not be irrational to accept slower growth (scare off customers due to lock-in) in return for diminished chance of rapid, large-scale customer desertion (they can't easily leave, due to lock-in).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It reduces the competitive moat yes. BUT it also give people more incentive to try your product. "Hey, if it doesn't work out you're not locked in. so why not START with us and if you're ever unhappy then you can move on.". The best next step for them is to make it really easy to get your data into their product line from their competitors. Like that guy upthread who was trying to extract 1.5k contact cards from AOL, for example.
This is good press for them on multiple levels.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
No. The reason it's a bad analogy is because it misses the key and only crucial point: the fundamental disconnect between "your things" and "cannot take" when the latter is arbitrarily imposed on you by a party that has no legitimate claim on the former. The landlord has no claim on "your things" unless you have breached contract somehow, like not paying rent. Otherwise taking "your things" with you when moving out is an activity not to be questioned at all. A better analogy might be that the mere act of moving in resulted in the landlord claiming "your things" were now "his things" without any justification supported by law or common cultural practice. The Google Data Liberation Group is (belatedly, IMHO) expending energy to rectify a situation that should never have existed in the first place. A laudable effort, to be sure, but one that should not have been necessary.
Imagine you've been driving your car for years, and have accumulated lots of map notes, music, and playlists in your car's navigation and music systems. When you decide you want to buy a new car from a different manufacturer, you're free to do so, but you can't simply transfer all your settings to the new vehicle, even though it has similar systems. The only way to move it all over is to manually re-enter/recopy each item, which would take many hours.
Are you unaware of their export-to-CSV capabilities..?
Google More Obvious Name Group Seeks To Make Names More Obvious
No, you take out your stuff, they may keep a copy.
The leased apartment is a perfect analogy in this respect. No one can be sure that the landlord didn't use his master key when you were away and took pictures of all your stuff. Maybe he has his own apartment decorated exactly like yours.
But why should he? Unless you are a world-famous interior decorator, what reason would anyone have to copy your layout? Likewise, what incentive does Google have to keep copies of your data? They may keep information about you, for statistics, just like a marketing researcher may look into your trash can to see what products you buy, but that's not such a big deal.
I think people are too nervous about the assumed value of their on-line data. Think of how much data about you was public long before home computers existed. Your phone number and address are written in a book that's given for free to everyone who has a telephone. You carry a plate with a unique id code on the outside of your car. Every cheque you use to pay something has your signature and bank account number. All these items can and *have* been used by fraudsters in the past. Why should we get more nervous just because the data is in a digital format?
The highest rated suggestion - over a thousand votes - on the data liberation site is about Google Maps.
Specifically - the rather loose definition of what we can and can't do with the data.
http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=43649&t=4364a
You can extract a kml from a my-maps thing you've drawn on top of googles satellite imagery easily.
But what can you do with this?
Google have made vague and unclear statements that 'bulk' use is not allowed - without saying what this is.
Yahoos terms and conditions allow uses like this, and much of OpenStreetMap has been helped by this for example - people able to trace streets, streams, and ...
But the license for data derived from maps is still unclear - can I for example take a list of 3000 river crossings from google, crowdsource how easy they are to get across with a 4x4 or a donkey, and then publish this list?
And if I sell the list, or publish a book of maps using this data combined with openstreetmap data?
While this is a valid concern, you can take it too far. As a private citizen, it doesn't really bother me that Google crawls my email and my contacts' email and uses keywords to target ads. As a business, it would be more concerning, but even then only for certain types of data.
At the end of the day, they provide a service and need to be paid. They get paid through targeted ads - so if you don't want to see targeted ads, you're not "paying" Google, and why should they do things for you then?
It would be "evil" if they weren't up front about it or denied it - but data mining is Google's primary business, and they aren't hiding it. I've yet to see any instance of them declaring data sacred and then parsing it for their own purposes, either.
In short, I see no evidence that Google is "evil" - merely that they aren't doing things the way that a lot of F/OSS folks would prefer. They aren't making their money off support though, so that's expected.
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