Google Owns Most Of My Life And It Scares Me
Google's acquisition of FeedBurner earlier this week adds one more piece of my life to Google's servers. I currently keep personal data or rely on: FeedBurner, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, AdSense and Docs & Spreadsheets. I'm taking a lot of risk on by relying on Google for so much of my personal life. The same as if my hard drive were to crash, if Google were to go bye-bye some day, I'd be out of a lot of data.
Offline, I protect myself by backing up my data, storing data on multiple drives and storing data online. So why don't I afford myself the same protection online? The primary reason is that any way to backup my online data is cumbersome, and more importantly, not automatic. Another reason is that backup is only half of the equation; what about restore? There's no non-hacked-together way to restore data to most online services and so the ability to backup is pretty much pointless.
So where does this leave us? At the very least, should I be looking to spread my data across many companies? Does the increased survivability risk of an early-stage startup offset the diversifiable risk of keeping my data on one provider?
All this talk of Apollo, Silverlight, RIAs and the like makes us feel good about the future of web apps, but what about the boring stuff like backup and data portability? Open APIs are a step in the right direction, but most people don't want to have to deal with writing scripts and implementing their own backup system - they want it simple and seamless. Is there a solution in the works? What are you all doing to backup your online life (or are you not)?
Technorati Tags: Google, FeedBurner, Gmail, Google Reader, API, backup, personal data
