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Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, Google, Microsoft

Google says: "Take your data with you!"

GoogleJust say no to data lock-in! That's what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at San Francisco's Web 2.0 conference earlier this week. "If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users," Schmidt said. "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better." He said that making it easy for users to leave at any time and take their data with them keeps the company on its toes, and that other software companies should adopt a similar policy. He also said that Google's ever-expanding corpus of web-based office programs isn't "an office suite" per se and that Google isn't trying to replace Microsoft's ubiquitous Office.

Filed under: Web services

11 ways to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks

Backup del.icio.usWe've talked about data lock-in before, that sorry state when a web service won't give you your data in a useful, standard format. del.icio.us, I am happy to observe, is no such web service, and by way of proof I direct you to 11 ways to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks. In addition to the obvious—export HTML or XML—you can backup to Gmail or straight to a MySQL database, safe them to an Excel spreadsheet, automatically sync them with a whole pile of other bookmarking services, and more.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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