Media Blog

There’s a certain level of trust that goes along with using a cloud-based web application. You upload your photos and your documents so you can access them everywhere, but you also trust that you’ll be able to pull those photos and documents down any time you want.

It sounds like a perfectly reasonable assumption, but many web-based services make it difficult for you to export your data. Worse, they’ll charge you a fee for the privilege. Some offer APIs — a bonus if you’re technically astute, but a solution that leaves the average user short on options.

To prevent such headaches, Google recently launched the Data Liberation Front, an initiative within the company to ensure every one of its products has a clear, easy option for users to export their data in bulk and take their business elsewhere.

Leading this project is Brian Fitzpatrick, an engineering manager at Google. Brian and his team launched an educational website at dataliberation.org in September where you can track their progress and find instructions for exporting your Blogger blog, your Picasa photos, your Gmail inbox, or whatever service you want to bail on.

It may seem odd as business strategies go, but as a practice, data portability and the trust it engenders are key to fueling the growth of the open web. In the following interview, Brian explains why this concept is especially important now, as more of us are sharing our data not only with Google, but with Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and other major players. He also hints at some new export features coming to popular Google products — like the ability to export all of your Google Docs files in a single, downloadable Zip archive.
Webmonkey: What led to the creation of this initiative within Google?

Brian Fitzpatrick: Even before I joined Google, I heard (CEO) Eric Schmidt speak. And one of the things I heard him say time and time again is, “we don’t lock our users in.” If they wish to leave, they are free to do so, and they can take their data with them. After I started, the one thing I kept hearing over and over again from the team was that we focus on our users first, and everything else follows that principle.

In talking to other engineers here, I realized that we don’t lock our users in. But while the door isn’t ever locked, in some cases, it could use a little bit of grease. It’s a little stuck.

We asked various product people if they’ve looked into doing an easy bulk-export type of thing where users can take out their data — and put it in — en masse. The typical response was, “Oh, it’s been on our roadmap for four or five years, it’s just de-prioritized because we have to work on these things our users are demanding.” So, it just wasn’t getting done.

We decided to start a small team of engineers to do just that — go around to our various products and help build those systems.

WM: So it wasn’t a question of evangelizing data liberation since the product managers were already sold on it, but more of a mission to go install the plumbing?

BF: Yeah, but we’re also trying to raise awareness in general. Most engineers don’t typically think about data liberation. They’re more involved in launching products. But I think it’s important because it’s a way for our users to trust us more.

WM: How much do you see the Data Liberation project as good policy for Google internally versus good policy for the web in general?

BF: I would love nothing more for other companies to copy-cat us on this. It’s good policy because we’re in a different world than we were in ten years ago.

If you wanted a piece of software ten years ago, you’d go to the store, buy a box and take it home. If you wanted to try another piece of software, you’d have to go back to the store, buy another floppy and do the whole process over again. There’s a huge barrier to trying different things out.

Today, if you want to try something else out, you just type another URL in your web browser. We want people to try our software, and if we’re going to encourage people to put data in the cloud and use more cloud-based apps, it’s important to show that it should be easy to get that data out as well. I want more people to think about this. It’s an important thing, and most people don’t think “I want to get my data out,” until it’s too late.

To be very clear: It’s not that Google is just an altruistic, lovable, huggable company. I think we’re a good company, but we get a benefit from this. We benefit from the work we do with open web standards, open-source and data liberation. But if you’re using a Google product now and you decide to go somewhere else, the easier we make it to leave and take your data with you, the more likely you are to come back and use something we come out with in the future.

There’s also the “rising tide floats all boats” analogy — the more we contribute to the success of the internet, the more we contribute to our own success since we’re such a big player.

WM: So, are you taking steps to future proof your products as well? Like in the case of Google Docs, or in the case of feed-based data, are you making sure what’s supported today will be supported in 10 years?

BF: We’re focusing on open formats wherever possible. So, you’ll see things coming out in open-documented Atom feeds, XML feeds.

In the case of Docs in particular, there’s something great we’re working on at the moment. Right now you can get your docs out one at a time. We’re working on a way for you to be able to select multiple docs at once, choose whatever format you’d like — ODF or MS Word or whatever — and our server will convert everything for you, create a Zip file and stream it down to you. (Brian says this feature will launch within the next couple of months).

WM: That’s great for backups.

This is interesting, too. Last winter, we launched Blogger liberation. When you log in to Blogger, there are options for “import blog” and “export blog.” It’s a nice, user-friendly experience, an easy download. We noticed some people were exporting their blog every other day — they were just creating a back up. We have several copies of their blog across several data centers, but these people felt more comfortable having their own copy on their own computers.

WM: There are other Google tools that run back ups automatically, like Picasa, where you can sync your photo library in the desktop app to your album on the web, right?

BF: Right, and we’ve been doing some additional work with Picasa because we’ve recognized we can do a better job with syncing things like your photos’ metadata.

WM: That’s interesting because data portability on the social web isn’t only about your data, it’s also largely about your metadata — your tags in Picasa and who they’re attached to, who you follow in Blogger and your ratings and comments for their posts. Are those bits of metadata being taken into account?

BF: It’s really hard to keep up with the features of individual services and the smaller bits, since they’re all so different. I don’t know if Blogger is exporting follow data. I know in Reader, you can get a list of the blogs you follow if you export your reading list to an OPML file, but you don’t get a list of the posts you’ve starred. There’s some education needed there, and some things that merit more attention. I don’t think we have the answer for all that yet.

WM: It also raises the question of interoperability among social sites. There are emerging standards that don’t yet have broad support but are gaining steam — things like Portable Contacts, OAuth, Activity Streams. How much attention is Google paying to making sure its import and export systems play well with smaller social sites who are adopting these new open standards? Versus, say, the attention being paid to bulk data export?

BF: I think that’s more relevant to the teams working on products that touch on those standards. Our team currently has a pretty sharp focus on data you create in our apps or that you’ve imported into our apps — making it so you can get that out. As far as interoperability, we’re obviously big supporters, and anything we can do to make it any easier to build on the open web, we’re doing.

For example, on OpenSocial we make it easy for developers to write apps that can be shared among different social networks. Google has also done work with OAuth. But the Data Liberation team is primarily concerned with helping you get your data in and out. It’s sort of step one of n steps.

WM: OK, so that’s your first order of business. Is there a list of tasks related to data liberation you’ve lined up to accomplish in your downtime?

BF: One thing we’re studying is the fact that your hard drive capacity is expanding way faster than your network capacity. Your hard drive capacity increases by an order of magnitude every four years. So that means by 2017, you’ll have a multi-terabyte iPod in your pocket.

Network capacity has only increased a little bit by comparison. Ten or so years ago, you had dial-up, or if you were super-advanced, you had DSL. The network speeds we have now are not a lot faster when paired with the growth of hard drive capacity. So, there are a lot of difficulties when dealing with larger data sets. How am I going to get 20 terabytes from Chicago to Mountain View quickly? I’m going to put it on hard drives and FedEx it.

We’re brainstorming about making it easier for people to move that size of data set around, or to gain access to that data.

See Also:

• Google’s ‘Data Liberation Front’ Aims to Make Your Data Portable
• Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had
• Google and Facebook to Join the Data Portability Debate

Web standards give developers a way to build websites so that anyone can access them. Unfortunately web standards don’t cover more difficult problems, like how to make sure people can find what they want on your site.

For that developers need to turn to common design patterns, but unfortunately many design patterns are outdated. For example it was long held as a common belief that most users would not scroll down the page, so your content needed to be “above the fold” if it was to be noticed — a term leftover from newspapers where the primarily headlines are above the fold, so those walking by a newsstand would see the important stuff even though the paper was folded in half. The web equivalent of above the fold is the area you can see without scrolling.

However, that conventional wisdom is not nearly as true today as it was back when Jakob Nielsen encouraged developers to keep everything above the fold. Of course Nielsen’s own site has plenty of content below the fold — after all, the web isn’t a newspaper.

CXPartners, a U.K.-based design agency, recently posted the results of a study involving some 800 user testing sessions, and on only 3 occasions did the page fold stymie users.

Part of the reason for the shift can be seen in CXPartners’ hotspot study, which used eye tracking software to reveal that users nearly always spend some time glancing at the scrollbar to judge page size. Now, that doesn’t mean you bury your best content below the fold, but it does mean that you shouldn’t worry too much about things that simply don’t fit above the fold.

But one surprising thing thing comes out of the study is that having less above the fold actually encouraged exploration below the fold. According to CXPartners’s study, the judicious use of white space and visual clues that lead the eye down the page significantly increase the chances a user will scroll.

The key is to make sure there are no barriers that would make your users think there is no “below the fold” content. One example cited in the study had a large horizontal bar running across the page, which acted as a barrier — it looked like the bottom of the page even though it wasn’t. Eliminating the horizontal bar encourage users to scroll the page.

Although it might run against your aesthetics as a designer, clipped text and cut off images are also high on the list of things that encourage scrolling.

Here’s CXPartners’ suggestions based on their user testing research:

1. Less is more — don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.
2. Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling — this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.
3. Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars — the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

So what would Jakob Nielsen think? Well, actually he seems to have weighed in in the comments, suggesting that what CXPartners discovered is old news. That may be true for Nielsen, but the CXPartners’ write up is much more readable than the technical, jargon-filled document Nielsen points to, and even if “below the fold” is a myth, it’s a well established one and there’s no harm in debunking it again.

Be sure to check out the comments on the CXPartners site for some helpful design tips and techniques from readers, as well as some thoughtful criticisms of the study.

Photo: Matthew Bradley/Flickr, CC

See Also:

• Design Patterns Solve Common Problems for Web’s Color Blind Users
• Why No One is Using Your Application or Website
• Usability Problems Users Hate Most

Mozilla has pushed back the release of the first Firefox 3.6 beta by another week, but when Firefox 3.6 beta 1 does arrive it will include support for several new Windows 7 features. Currently the schedule calls for the first beta of Firefox 3.6 to arrive on October 21, one day before Microsoft’s official release of Windows 7.

If you just can’t wait another week and would like to start testing now, there is a pre-beta build of Firefox 3.6 available with some of the new Windows 7 features included.

The big Windows 7 news in Firefox 3.6 is support for Aero Peek tab previews — the page and tab previews available in the Windows 7 task bar. As with other Win 7 apps, hovering your mouse over Firefox’s task bar icon will pop up previews of all your Firefox windows and tabs, making it quicker and easier to navigate between them.

Also due to arrive when the final version of 3.6 ships is support for Windows 7 jump lists. The jump lists can be accessed by right clicking on the Firefox task bar icon, which gives you access to a list of your most frequently visited websites, buttons to create a new window or tab and the option to “pin” Firefox to the task bar.

Firefox 3.6 will also offer a number of speed improvements for Windows 7 and other operating systems as well, along with support for fullscreen, open source video and more HTML5 and CSS 3 improvements. For more details on what’s coming in Firefox 3.6, check out our coverage of the alpha release.

Firefox 3.6 is expected to ship some time before the end of 2009.

See Also:

• Firefox 3.6 Aims to Bring Fullscreen, Open Source Video to the Web
• Reach Out and Touch the Web With Firefox’s Coming Multitouch Support
• Mozilla Shows What’s to Come in Firefox 3.6 Alpha Release
• Troubleshooting Firefox Gets Easier With New ‘About:Support’ Page