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The Story of Florian's Feeds Florian Dargel just had a painful experience: "Bloglines ate my subscriptions. AAARGH! My carefully gathered OPML file has vanished and only a trace of the former 400+ fat feeds file remains. I hope they roll it back pronto, it's a major loss of productivity for me. hasn't occurred to me to back up the online services I use - I thought the whole point was that they do it for you." Florian's story is everyone's story. Our data is going to outlive the machine it's currently on, be it web server or laptop. It is most certainly going to outlive whatever software company or web service its in with its undetectable business model and burn rate, either of VC cash or love by someone who just wanted to write some code. There's one thing your data won't outlive: the actions of a sleep-deprived and overworked sysop working on the machine where your data lives. So why, in 2006, do we depend on humans to backup when those humans are sitting in front of powerful computers? OPML export is the potential for data freedom. You're not locked into some vendor's service, you can export your data --but that freedom's only a reality if we actually excercise it. Florian could have exported an OPML file of his subscriptions, but he didn't. Now this is not, not, not a tale of how Florian messed up. If vendors really want to commit on competing by being better rather than by locking customers in, they'll do more than check the OPML export box on the buzzword sheet. They'll cache a copy of the user's data on a machine of the user's choosing by default -- and keep it updated. Without asking. Without depending on them to remember. Unless the user checks the "No, I'd really rather not back up because I enjoy losing my data" button. I want to point out that the software I used to write and publish the words you are reading automatically saves a copy on my local machine. It does this as a matter of course. Why doesn't your software do that for you? Won't your blog outlive the server it's on, a box you may have never seen? Won't your bookmarks outlive del.icio.us? It's 2006. Software and services should export and backup. There, was that so hard? Hugs, developers; we love you. We don't want to be mad at you when our data gets lost because of a server crash. Help us out -- and help yourself out -- we don't have to be mad at each other so often over who lost the data and who didn't back up. Hi, everybody -- I'll be traveling from Boston to the Bay Area until next Tuesday. Should be fun! |
Last modified: Friday, January 27, 2006 at 6:58 AM.
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