I Got 99 Free Services But A Backup Ain't One

27 September 2012

Feedburner is the latest service to send out a death knell. While its not dead dead, it’s as good as dead.

It’s the latest in a rash of shutdowns, acquire hires, and significant redesigns all of which freak me the fuck out. It’s now my turn to realize that I depend on way to many free services and I don’t know how in some cases to turn back the clock. I feel confident that I could devise my own schemes to replace every free service that I use, but at what cost, and could I really maintain them all.

I suppose this is why data export is so important. If all these services allowed easy export I could always be constantly exporting and backing up that data. Even that would become cumbersome. So, could we devise a better system?

I can imagine an interesting solution here. What if you had one company that had a paid service and their entire job was to be the repository of your data wherever you went on the web.

By centralizing your data like that there would be a couple of benefits. You would only have one set of data to backup. You could block any company at a moments notice from seeing your data. As well as peace of mind that you had your digital library taken care of. It could free up new product innovators to concentrate just on ideas. it could give them some room to just concentrate on the user experience.

Hmm, this could be cool.

PS: I suppose Dropbox does this a little bit, but everything is files. Which could work, but it would be cooler if they also offered like a way to store structured JSON.

PPS: I am going to migrate from Feedburner, and I want to keep this around for posterity. Here is the ride for this blog. I got a monstrous spike in users about a year ago. I still don’t know why, but engagement has gone up with the increase in readers so I assume it’s legitimate.