Dave Winer’s Not So Good at Sharing
May 19th, 2008 by Bullshit MancusoIn a post today about how sites should give users back their data, Dave Winer sings his own praises in this regard, complete with a lame claim for credit:
I’ve always believed that blogging and RSS tools should export their data so users can switch tools and the products at UserLand all did this. As a result, there’s a tradition among RSS readers that they import and export OPML subscription lists. It happened because Radio UserLand, the early market leader, did.
One thing he neglects to mention, which was pointed out several times by McD in comments here: In the entire time that Share Your OPML was running, the site never shared its OPML. Thousands of users shared their OPML subscription lists with Winer’s site, at his urging, and he never reciprocated.
As for the portability of data in Radio LuserLand and Winer’s other software, there’s a reason that Robert Scoble and most other LUserLand bloggers never moved their data when they abandoned the software, leaving years of work and all of their subscribers behind. It’s a giant nightmare to get the data out, because the software’s export capabilities are non-standard, XML support is a messy kludge, and there are character encoding glitches out the ass.
Even Donovan Watts, the author of Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual and the biggest expert on the software, never exported his blog when he switched to WordPress.
Data portability requires more than some cheesy “seal of approval” Winer is thinking about giving out. You have to do the work to fully support the standards that make data portable.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Interesting post, but totally wrong.
We provided a tool for exporting Manila websites in XML.
http://www.thetwowayweb.com/theXmlFiles
You could download your Manila site from EditThisPage.com and all other UserLand-hosted Manila servers as well as any of our customers servers, the feature was built-into Manila.
All the data for a Radio weblog was already on the user’s hard drive. I don’t know how it could possibly be easier. You didn’t even need to export.
Keep trying, you may find we made mistakes, all software developers do.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:37 am
I never said you didn’t provide export tools. I said that they worked for shit. I’ve attempted to move data out of your software. When the software didn’t crash while iterating over records in the object database, it spat out XML with bad characters that made the resulting XML invalid and required hand-editing to fix. Like Scoble and Watts — and you yourself on many blogs — I just left the data in your software and started over.
Your software’s a locked trunk, but not because you locked it. You just didn’t know how to design a trunk that opens.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
…odd. No response to the irony (hypocrisy?) of “shareyouropml” not returning the favor, Dave?
May 19th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
It doesn’t make any difference if the data is on your hard drive if it’s in a proprietary format that nobody else can read. winer made it as difficult as possible to export the data. Fortunately, some bloggers felt so abused by winer that they wrote their own export tools. Few people took advantage of it, even former Luserland CEO John Robb never exported his Radio blog. There was a big contretemps over that, winer threw another hissy fit. What an asshole.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
To go a step further. If the data you ‘export’ isn’t in a (valid), easily readable format, is it really any better than not releasing it at all?
After all, NetFlix “exports” your ratings data to the browser… it can’t be sucked up by any other system, but it’s every bit as accessible as Manila… the end result of both is that you have to write a program to get the data from point A to point B.
“Open In Name Only”