Get Your Data Back

Jason Scott over at ASCII has a rather hearty rant about the Cloud we are supposed to put all our data in. And he is absolutely right. In fact, it couldn't be said better!

Over the last few years we've all been trained to entrust a large number of companies and organizations with a lot of our work - photos, stories, bookmarks, backups, calendars, spreadsheets, texts, movies, GPS data, 3D models, panoramas... you get the idea.

And many of these services are great and offer us a never-before known way to present and share our work with others and to interact with lots and lots of freely available data from all around the world.

But what these services almost never even mention is that fact that if you didn't back up your data before you uploaded it, or if you in fact created it in the cloud, all the time you've spent and all the information out there can disappear in a minute.

As the creator of MapSkip I am myself guilty of creating a sink for your information, and I will actually make it one of my top priorities to add a reasonable option to allow users to export their own stories from the site whenever they want to do so. I'm not sure yet what form this will take, but it will be most likely a one-click download of a text file with all your stories. I'll try and have that up and running by the end of February.

Maybe this is one of those things that need a name - something like "One-Click Retrieval" or "Quick Download" with a snazzy logo. This should then be made a standard feature that every self-respecting social network and Web 2.0 data sink will HAVE to have if they want to look serious about your data.