data portability and the trust it engenders are key to fueling the growth of the open web

Webmonkey has an interview with Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick, the lead of the dataliberation front project, which aims to make all data put into Google systems portable, and easy to get out again.

From the intro, an excerpt on why this is important:

“There’s a certain level of trust that goes along with using a cloud-based web application. You upload your photos and your documents so you can access them everywhere, but you also trust that you’ll be able to pull those photos and documents down any time you want.

It sounds like a perfectly reasonable assumption, but many web-based services make it difficult for you to export your data. Worse, they’ll charge you a fee for the privilege. Some offer APIs — a bonus if you’re technically astute, but a solution that leaves the average user short on options.

To prevent such headaches, Google recently launched the Data Liberation Front, an initiative within the company to ensure every one of its products has a clear, easy option for users to export their data in bulk and take their business elsewhere.

Leading this project is Brian Fitzpatrick, an engineering manager at Google. Brian and his team launched an educational website at dataliberation.org in September where you can track their progress and find instructions for exporting your Blogger blog, your Picasa photos, your Gmail inbox, or whatever service you want to bail on.

It may seem odd as business strategies go, but as a practice, data portability and the trust it engenders are key to fueling the growth of the open web.”

And here’s a quote from Brian, on ‘what’s in it for Google’:

“To be very clear: It’s not that Google is just an altruistic, lovable, huggable company. I think we’re a good company, but we get a benefit from this. We benefit from the work we do with open web standards, open-source and data liberation. But if you’re using a Google product now and you decide to go somewhere else, the easier we make it to leave and take your data with you, the more likely you are to come back and use something we come out with in the future.

There’s also the “rising tide floats all boats” analogy — the more we contribute to the success of the internet, the more we contribute to our own success since we’re such a big player.”