Dave Naffziger's Blog

So much for Eric Schmidt’s goal of making user data portable:

Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle, Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

I recently helped talk Rahul into switching from Blogger to WordPress. It was a very painful process. In doing so, he discovered that the new Blogger Beta broke all of the existing WordPress import functions.

The new Blogger beta makes it incredibly hard to port your blog out of Blogger and in to WordPress. It never was easy before, but Blogger now broke the dominant method of importing WordPress. And, of course the switch means that you lose all of your existing inbound links (but that’s not new).

Work arounds do exist, but none of them work smoothly or completely (the first one requires you to manually save pages…).

So, in the line of the recent Open Letters, here’s an open request Google to live up to their own portability standards with Blogger:

• Live up to your own data portability standards. Provide export functionality for all blogger content (posts, comments, accounts, uploads, themes, etc.). At a minimum, create a set of downloadable files. Actually, create API access so other blogging programs can move users over.
• Make reputation portable. True portability doesn’t end with data. Provide user configurable 301-redirects for the domain and all blog posts and comments. Make this available via API.