Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data 167
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.'"
The Anti-AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Interesting atitude, "Anti-lockin"... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
MapMaker vs. openstreetmap (Score:4, Interesting)
Useful email backup tool (Score:4, Interesting)
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 :)
Re:interesting analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
my favorite essay on who has your data (Score:3, Interesting)
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html/ [linuxmafia.com]
Rick Moen . . .
INOLJ-OOW2.0C (Is Not On LiveJournal Or Other Web 2.0 Cults)
It's worth the read.
Re:interesting analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:Interesting atitude, "Anti-lockin"... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why we give our customers 5 methods of export: PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, and XML. Every order, customer, report, and product can be exported for back up or to take elsewhere. The only thing they can't get to is credit card details. And we won't release those for obvious reasons. So that might be a headache if they switched to another service, but...
Re:The Anti-AOL (Score:3, Interesting)
I left AOL in 2001, but my roommate wrote the original Personal Filing Cabinet, and I can confirm that there's no known official way of exporting any of it, or at least there wasn't last I checked. There are some third-party tools that do a so-so job of the mail itself, but they are very picky about which AOL client version you have, and I don't know if they export the address book itself... and it looks like they've all been abandoned anyway (there was ForMorph, PFCViewer, and FvonGordon's PFC Converter).
And yes, it's cool to see Google doing this of their own (apparent) volition. It's tempting, when you're the 800-pound gorilla, to view your user base as a captive audience, and to make it as difficult as possible to switch away (we used to call that "flypaper"). But in the long term, it encourages competition, which fosters innovation, which benefits everyone.
Exporting the data is only half the battle. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [appspot.com]
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?
Re:MapMaker vs. openstreetmap (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export [dataliberation.org].
There are some caveats on this KML export, for instance you're not allowed to bulk export data: "Also, you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude coordinates."
This is a vague limitation; can I get all my tens of bicycle paths back and what about the tens or hundreds friends of me did etc.
I do understand that entering 'public' data (where roads are) is different from private data (gmail). So the DLF is doing a good job on the latter, but I'm curious about the former: user contributed public data. I can see the result of an added road by user X, so why can I not access the raw data?
There is an interesting discussion going on on Ed Parsons (google) blog http://www.edparsons.com/2009/09/liberating-your-my-maps-data/ [edparsons.com]