Wow, this is a scary story. I’m glad it worked out well for him but this is a very real issue is something we should all be aware of as we move more and more into services. At some level it comes down to a company trust issue but a lot of people trust Google and it seems like there’s not much recourse for something like this if it happens to you.

I’m a big fan of services and of storing data online. I want to have access to my stuff wherever I am and the web is a great way to do that. But I also want to have a solid backup and I want my data to live in my machine in addition to the cloud. I think one of the best examples of this is NewsGator. I’ve got NetNewsWire on my desktop for my feeds and NewsGator when I want to log in from somewhere else and check news. This is one area where Adobe’s RIA strategy can really help companies. You can pretty quickly create a desktop version with extra hooks that lets your users store their data wherever they want and take it offline with them. And since AIR just uses web technologies you can keep the user interface consistent if you want. Data portability is going to be a bigger and bigger deal and AIR works really well to help implement it.

[tags]Online, Cloud, AIR[/tags]