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Perhaps I'm more paranoid than most, but I'm young, and I've seen services I relied upon shut down several times. The problem, however, is that letting users r
by pavpanchekha 15y ago
Perhaps I'm more paranoid than most, but I'm young, and I've seen services I relied upon shut down several times. The problem, however, is that letting users rescue their user-generated content /hurts/ the company doing the hosting. Only a few companies, such as Google, let you actually export your data; fewer let you keep it in active sync. But I wish more companies would realize that the loss due to not boxing in your users is usually minor; and the gain is also minor, unless your site shuts down, which it likely will, in which case an export feature is something you'll have to build no matter what; better build that before-hand.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoGoogle's user engagement model is to send visitors away as quickly as possible, in such a manner that they want to come back soon. The Yahoo/Facebook model, on the other hand, is to create a big enough garden that visitors want to stick around. The former model is not afraid of users being able to extract their stuff, whereas the latter loses much of its value when users can access their stuff outside the garden.
- eCa 15y agoThat was the old search-centric Google, not the Google of Gmail and G+ etc. The more time you spend in Google's Garden, the more ads you'll see and the more they are based on the data you bring into the Garden. They no longer want you to leave.
- gwern 15y agoI recently tried out the G+ exporting functionality; it seemed to work fairly well for everything I had posted. (Not sure if it pulled my comments on other peoples' posts - didn't check that.)