DeLong Smackdown Watch: Fear the Cloud!!

Hoisted from Comments: jfaughnan said:

Time to Think About the Stability of Web Services...: Brad,

Google has axed several web services with total data loss. They did in Pages (partial data save), Notebook (total loss), a failed pre-facebook social networking site and a few more.

They've also essentially killed several web services by abandoning development.

The problem with the cloud is much bigger than this. The real answer is SimpleNote -- completely portable data.

See my latest rant with abundant links:

http://notes.kateva.org/2010/12/yahoo-kills-delicious-don-say-you-weren.html

And:

Gordon's Notes: Yahoo kills Delicious - don't say you weren't warned about the Cloud: Not surprising ...

Michael Tsai - Blog - Yahoo Shuts Down Delicious: Delicious was a good service, and I’m sorry to see all the data and metadata that people have entered go away

Some fear Flickr is next - like Digital Railroad. I wrote about Yahoo's likely use of Flickr in 2008.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

I don't put anything "in the Cloud" I can't walk away from. One reason I use Simplenote is that I have completely usable and completely current local copies of all data. If they go away tomorrow I can switch to an alternative in minutes.

Google deserves credit for supporting "data freedom" -- which is the only thing that can make the Cloud tolerable. Most recently the data liberation front gave OS X users an easy way to download entire online albums.  Google has a spotty data history, but I give them credit for their data freedom team.

See also:

Dapocalypse now. Grab your data and run. RUN. (AOL xDrive, AOL photos, Google Lively, Yahoo User Profiles, MSN Groups, Digital Railroad)
Fear the Cloud: Microsoft Danger was well named (Remember danger?)
Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?
Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site
Jean-Louis Gassée on Cloud 2.0 – post of the month
Fear the Cloud - Blogger's unfixed 5000 post limit (months later they fixed this)
Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems