October 2009

Taken with a Sidekick 3

I took the above photo with my Sidekick 3, a phone that at the time I loved dearly. It was probably one of the best phones on the market until the iPhone came on the scene and still does things that the iPhone can’t do – in particular instant messaging. (I still miss my friends on chat who vanished from the Internet when they got iPhones.) It was way ahead of its time.

But there was one thing that always bothered the crap out of me about the Sidekick. It was basically impossible to sync data between the Sidekick and any other data source – not my local address book, not my gmail accounts – nothing. You just couldn’t get to data. Sure, there was a clunky web site where you could edit data on the phone and see everything including email and contact data. But you couldn’t get it out – there were no export tools. There was a binary tool that you could use in Windows to sync it with Outlook, but that was painful given that I didn’t have Windows at the time. I tried it once – it didn’t work very well and I was left with an even worse mess when I was done.

When I switched to my G1, I remember going through the address book, pulling out phone hundreds of phone numbers and entering them into gmail by hand. It sucked. And in the end it turns out that anyone with a last name higher in the alphabet higher than “N” never had their phone numbers re-entered – I just gave up.

That collected data was trapped on the Sidekick and with Danger’s (now Microsoft’s) service. I’m not sure if it was lock-in that was born from ignorance or from a desire to give you another reason to not move to another phone. But it doesn’t matter. In case you missed it Danger/Microsoft managed to lose everyone’s data. Like, all of it. And people had no easy way to keep a backup because the tools didn’t exist.

When you put your data in the “cloud” this is what happens – you’re delegating that responsibility to someone else.

This is what bothers me about devices like the Sidekick and services like Facebook. Data goes in and it doesn’t come out. (In Facebook’s case you “own your own data” but if you pull it out it comes with usage restrictions so it’s essentially useless. You can’t use it to sync to another data source or another service. The rhetoric there doesn’t match the actual terms of service.) It means you can’t make backups and you can’t get to the point where you have a single set of data because you’re syncing with a bunch of services.

Lock-in by effect or lock-in by design isn’t something that any of us should be tolerating, but we do. In our cell phones, in our web services – lots of places. But we should be aware. Sometimes someone makes a mistake that affects tends of thousands or hundreds of thousands of us. And because of early decisions we’re not able to recover from it in a decentralized manner.

This is a wake-up call that my data should be my data. It’s not a tool for someone else to use to make it me less likely to go somewhere else with my attention and my dollars.