Geodog

Who owns my data? Furl vs. Gmail

I received an email today from Furl founder Mike Giles, announcing that he had sold Furl to Looksmart. John Battelle, ever quick off the mark, posted that when he talked to Mike about it, Mike explained he picked Looksmart because they wouldn't make him move to California, and because they would allow him to keep developing the Furl service in the way he wanted to.

I liked Furl, although I haven't used it much since I created a home-grown system for saving and indexing web pages to create my personal version of the Internet Archive (more on that later, if anyone is interested). Furl works well, and I haven't noticed any appreciable downtime. I'm a little uncomfortable with Looksmart, because they are one of the few remaining search companies that mixes paid listings in with their search results. However, the great thing about Furl, for which Mike Giles should be commended, is that since very early on it provided functions to export the pages you had saved, and Mike has constantly improved upon them. I've used the functions several times in the past, and they work. After several unpleasant experiences during the dotcom era, I swore never to use a service that doesn't provide an easy way to get my data back onto my local machine. That's one of the reasons Geodog's gmail account sits unused -- while there are plenty of good hacks, there is no supported method to export your email from Google's servers. I feel safe using Furl, even after Looksmart bought them, knowing that no matter how their policies change, I can get a copy of my data any day I want to. If I wanted to, I could use cron and wget to make a backup daily.

Gmail users, what happens to your email if tomorrow Google mistakenly decides you have violated their TOS and shuts down your account?

Google may at any time and for any reason terminate the Services, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system.

With Yahoo you can spend $20 a year and buy POP3 access. With Google, you are currently SOL. Think about it. I hope Google and all the other companies providing us with services and eager to make money from the data we create also think about it, and start following Mike Giles' example.