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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.'"
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!
You should. If you are not jealous and trust her, she'll feel more "free" in the relationship and stay with you. On the other hand, if you keep watching her and always remind her that she's yours, she'll get away.
This is Slashdot. The appropriate version of this plattitude goes:"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers".
At the suggestive notion of Princess Leia, and the salacious interpretation of "Slip through your fingers", many of the regular posters will now compulsively grasp their crotch, as the OggTheora of "Slave Leia's Supplication" is summoned from Portable VNC on the USB key, once again...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
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.
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?