Backupify — Page 2

What Backupify is really about (Hint: It isn’t backups)

by Jay on February 25, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In some circles this is taken as an admonition not to listen to customer requests. In what I would term smarter circles, this is a reminder to remember what your company is about.

Henry Ford wasn’t selling a replacement for the horse, he was selling personal transportation. It just so happened that his answer for the best possible personal transportation was a horse-replacement, the automobile.

Apple, which is perhaps best associated with the “ignore the customers, we know better than them” interpretation of Ford’s philosophy is nonetheless a great example of remembering what business you’re in. Apple wanted to sell a better portable music experience, which resulted in the iPod. But Apple isn’t in the MP3 player business. It’s in the portable music experience — or, rather, portable media experience — business, which is why the iPod has become somewhat ignored in favor of the iPhone, iTouch (which is so far removed from the original iPod people rarely call them iPod Touchs anymore) and iPad.

Which brings us to Backupify. Yes, we backup your cloud-based data, but we’re not really selling cloud data backups. That’s the mechanism, not the business.

Backupify is selling control of your cloud-based data.

Your Gmail messages are just messages you happen to store in Gmail; the service doesn’t own the data. Backupify exists to detach the data from the service, the profile data from the profile page, the medium from the message. If Gmail fails, the data is safe. If you want to analyze the data, you can download it from us and parse it however you like. If you want to migrate away from Gmail to another e-mail solution, we’ll do our best to facilitate the changeover.

The same applies to your Facebook profile or Flickr albums. Those are your videos and pictures and birthday wishes and commiserations with friends. They belong to you, not to the cloud, and not to any specific brand or application. Backupify is here to make sure of it. That’s our business. That’s what we’re selling (or, in most cases, giving away).

Backupify is in the data control business. It just so happens that backing up cloud-based data is where we’ve started. But if a better solution comes along, we’ll be ready for it.

Don’t Let Good Become the Enemy of Great (gigaom.com)
Why GigaOm is right (and wrong) about Backupify (backupify.com)

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Now Supporting Backup Of Your Picasa Photos

by Rob on February 22, 2010

Picasa has been one of our most requested services, and after a good alpha test, we are finally launching Picasa photo backup in the beta section of Backupify. Since we wrote this after we wrote Flickr, we pulled in all the stuff you wanted (which we are adding to Flickr too, by the way). So Picasa backup includes:

photos
comments
tags
exif
geo-locations

Please login and try it out. This was our first service written from the ground up using Amazon’s RDS service, so that was a lot of fun and we have moved (and are moving) many of our other services to RDS. It also uses Google’s authentication protocol, so we don’t have to store your username and password.

If you have problems, questions, or comments, send us an email. And if you have friends that use Picasa, send them this link so they can backup those photos!

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Google Buzz (and its privacy problem) is an omen of things to come

by Jay on February 22, 2010

Image by Oversocialized via Flickr

Google makes money by being your information middleman and serving ads along the way. The search page is the universal home page, and so long as that search page is Google’s, they’ll continue to print obscene gobs of money. So what does this have to do with the “slow motion train wreck” that is Google Buzz, the new FriendFeed clone that Google tacked onto Gmail mere days ago? It’s all in how you connect the dots.

Facebook is doing a bang-up job displacing Google as the universal home page, to the point that Facebook basically owns social page referrals, which is to say links that were recommended by friends, rather than search engines. If social referrals start to rival basic search in volume, Facebook could outflank Google. This problem will probably only get worse for Google as MS Outlook becomes the “social hub” of MS Office, drawing in LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook data for the old fogeys who don’t use Web mail. (Moreover, Facebook is moving aggressively into mobile — the same mobile space Google wants Android to own, despite a huge rival in Apple’s iPhone — which means Google could get outflanked on two fronts by Team Zuckerberg.)

The answer? Google needed its own social referral engine, and shared links on Google Reader weren’t good enough. Enter Google Buzz, a redo of the FriendFeed service that Facebook bought not so long ago.

That’s all fine and good, except for two problems. First, Google hates user configuration; it wants to pre-optimize your experience by tuning it with what it already knows about you. This usually means using your Gmail contacts to connect you to whatever new service they roll out. For Google Buzz, this meant that millions of Gmail users were now automatically publishing their contact lists to millions of other Gmail users, which could be a big deal if you had confidential sources or clients that other people really shouldn’t (ethically, legally, or socially) know about. Reporters, lawyers, doctors and philanderers were all severely put out.

This might seem an obvious flaw that should have been caught in user testing, except for our second problem: Google rushed Buzz to market without subjecting it to standard user testing.

Google users screamed about the privacy problem, and Google had a fix rolled out in days — though not fast enough to avoid some government investigations of privacy violations. (Don’t laugh; Canada takes that stuff seriously.)

Google is fighting a pitched battle with Facebook and Apple. The stakes are getting higher, which means time-to-market for new Google, Facebook, and Apple services is going to get shorter. It also means the temptation to shoehorn a new feature into an old one — like Google did by trying to springboard Buzz by sucking in 175 million Gmail users — is going to be an ever more tempting tactic. TechCrunch lists the long and sordid history of “force-feeding” users new Web services – Facebook, AOL and Yahoo all appear on the list.

To paraphrase Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Possibly to you.

At some point, this trend is going to result in a huge data exposure or, worse, a huge data loss for a major, brand-name Web service. Don’t be surprised when it comes down the pike, and don’t be without a backup plan.