Predictions about the appeal of cloud computing were on the money. We increasingly share, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves with software and media on remote servers rather than on our own computers. But a big catch prevents more of us from investing much time or money in ephemeral digital media or constantly-changing online services: It can be difficult, if not impossible, to grab your stuff and split.

Say you don’t like the latest redesign of Kodak Gallery, formerly Ofoto. Some complain that the site now uploads photos in the wrong order — by size instead of date, as customer service confirmed — while others don’t like the “buy one thing per year or lose your photos” feature the site unveiled last year.

There’s no easy way for disgruntled customers to migrate their photos back to their own computers or to another service, although clever hacks exist. If you want your photos back, Kodak Gallery advises you to mouse over each photo and click to download them one-by-one.

Who has 60 or 70 hours to spare for downloading their own photos? Nobody we know.

Those who have been burnt by this sort of thing are less likely to trust another online service with memories, music, documents, books or anything else of import. Keeping media and other data locked up not only riles consumers, but could slow the growth of all sorts of online services.

Data portability is a rapidly growing movement among cloud-computing supporters. The idea that the online services we’ve herded ourselves into should let us at least pass from one pen to the next is key, although the nuts and bolts of how open standards will work are still being hammered out.

Here’s how a few of the major ones currently stack up in terms of data portability:



Bulk export?

Media affected Google Gmail

Yes

E-mail Google Docs

Yes

Office documents Google Picasa

Yes

Photos Google YouTube

No (single files only)

Videos, music Kodak Gallery / Ofoto

No (single files only)

Photos Facebook

No (can only delete account)

Text, contacts, photos, videos Rhapsody

No

Music subscriptions Amazon Kindle

No (single files only, Kindle format)

E-books Amazon MP3

N/A

Music downloads Apple iTunes

Yes in most cases (bulk export to MP3, but not for older DRM-ed files)

Music downloads

Out of this selection of prominent services, Google did particularly well. Only its YouTube site lacks a bulk-export option, and Google asks its users to vote on whether they want that feature added on DataLiberation.org, a Google website dedicated entirely to the data-portability issue.

“As people switch to ‘the cloud,'” explained Google spokeswoman Sara Jew-Lim, “we want to make sure they never feel like their data is locked into the web services they use, in some proprietary format or in some service they can’t extract it from (or that they have to pay to remove).”

For the user, the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the costs of administering one’s own services, which is why Tripod, the old DIY webpage-building site, is dead, while Facebook’s turnkey solution to creating an online presence continues to thrive. However, Facebook receives poor marks for data portability.

E-mails to Facebook’s press address were repeatedly referred to an on-vacation spokesman, so we couldn’t get an official response. But it offers no way to batch-download the photos, text or videos one has uploaded to the site, and it has a storied history of squelching users’ attempts to download their contacts. We understand that complicated data, such as relationships to friends and likes and dislikes, are difficult to share between competing social networks (although open standards embraced by Google Buzz and others, such as Activity Streams, Atom, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub, can help with that). At the very least, you should be able to grab your own photos, videos and text. Like Google, Facebook is a member of the Data Portability Project, a consortium of companies whose aim is to enable data to pass more easily between platforms, so perhaps it will loosen these restrictions.

Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, Facebook and other companies make these changes sooner rather than later. Online service providers would like us to migrate our lives into the cloud because when we do stuff there we can encounter advertisements. In addition, plenty of ways exist to get people to pay for premium versions of free services once they become power users (free e-mail accounts reach their space limits, photo services offer printing, online music sales and subscriptions, and so on).

Services and customers alike stand to gain from data portability, and the answer could be as simple as a big red button on free and paid online services that says “Give me all my data now.”

Some of the companies peddling these services would balk at the notion of making it easier for customers to leave. But if people knew they weren’t going to be locked in, they’d be more likely to pay or make the substantial time investments that lead to paying.

In other words, if online services love their customers, they should set them free.

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Image: Flickr/Customs