data Archive

Last night I was a guest on Aaron Brazell’s TechnosailorTV. We spoke mainly about Twitter and other social networks over the 40-minute discussion. One of the topics I brought up is what I call the "friend suitcase". The idea is simple – a person develops friendships (real friends) over time on all of the different social networks. Whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Jaiku, Driftr, Yelp, Brightkite, Toluu, etc., we’ve all met people we consider friends.

Once a person moves into friend status with me, I do my best to get them into my suitcase. I guess it’s my form of data portability. My suitcase contains the information for my friends that is outside any social network. It typically includes email addresses, snail mail addresses, phone numbers and instant messaging accounts. Email is still the main form of contact with most people and so it’s important that I can contact my friends via email when needed. Sure Twitter or Facebook is good, but email is almost 100% and the likelyhood that’s going down is near zero.

With all of the talk about Twitter’s potential death over the past few days, the idea of the friend suitcase becomes even more important. So many times we’ve said, "what happens if x dies, how will we find our friends" — the answer is the friend suitcase. When I need to get a hold of a friend in an emergency situation, I sure don’t want to see a fail whale.

Once data portability becomes the norm and users can select to share the data above, then filling my suitcase will become much easier. I don’t see these exporting options becoming the norm for at least the next 12-18 months.

Do you have a suitcase? If so, what pieces of information do you store in it? If not, do you assume that your friends will find you on the next social network?

CBS Sports has announced that beginning today you will be able to access all of their Fantasy Sports data for free on their new fantasynews.cbssports.com Web site. The fantasy sports market is huge and continues to grow and this move is likely to help CBS attempt to move into a leadership role. They will also push users to signup for their free and premium games.

The sports covered include: college football, pro football, baseball, hockey, golf and auto racing. CBSSports.com Fantasy News will also allow users to tap into an enormous amount of data-mining information from the CBSSports.com base of users, the most engaged and passionate fantasy players in the industry. From the most added/most dropped players to draft averages to the most traded players, visitors to CBSSports.com Fantasy News will be served hundreds of statistical breakdowns. The site will feature editorial content from the team of writers at CBS Sports. 

When will we have a fantasy league for bloggers? Like vote on when you think x person will step over the edge or when y person will be forced out due to z reason. Could be exciting. I’d take Scoble on a over-under to move to a new app off FriendFeed within 6 weeks.

Update: A CenterNetworks reader sent us the following regarding the above story: The Supreme Court handed down it’s denial of cert on a case yesterday which would have potentially killed the (above mentioned) product.

Social news aggregator Digg has announced several enhancements to their DataPortability support. Digg’s Steve Williams provides an overview of the updates which include:

– XFN Friends Network access – this lets other services tie-into your friends on Digg

– hCard access – this is basically your business card – allows other machines to read your Digg profile for the juicy bits of personal info

– They’ve also added RDFa, which Wikipedia explains "allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics."

These steps are a good move forward for DataPortability. It’s not exactly how I’d define DP but it’s a good step for Digg to make.

All of the presenters at the Future of Web Apps summit who run web apps talked about hosting and then discussed the importance of a good backup system. In my interview with Ted from Dogster following the event, he mentioned how his first backup app didn't run correctly and he lost a bit of data.

So this morning I get up, hit the power button and get a message that says "NTLDR not found" — lovely right? There goes all my data. Luckily it seems the bios changed the boot order and when I switched the hard drives boot order, the machine booted again. Then I get an email from a friend that his hard drive crashed last night and is reinstalling Windows from scratch. What fun that is, not to mention what data might be lost. So I immediately did a backup of everything on my hard drives to my external drives. So if this pc dies, I have everything backed up.

So then I thought about CenterNetworks and my other sites. Is the backup working correctly I wondered? So I checked and yes, the nightly backups are working as intended and everything looks good. So your comments, posts, etc. are all safe in multiple locations. I can't share the locations because I would have to silence each of you!

And then I see this post from Bridget at Toggl about how Toggl manages your data including backup and protection.

A note from the post:

Because you are trusting our application to hold your valuable meeting and time tracking information, the security of that data is incredibly important.

I think it is great for a growing company to say: Hey this is how we protect and backup your data. This is how we ensure your data is not going to be lost in the event of a hardware failure.

So I issue a challenge to the other web apps out there that collect and store user's data: Share some details about how you backup and protect our data.