We store more and more data on the net every day. Texts of any kind, photographs, personal data, telephone numbers, even thoughts (if you consider blog entries to be a product of the intelligence as opposed to mind garbagge ;))

But what happen to this data is that often they are tied with the service we have used. The things you can do with your data are thus limited to the features of the particular service. And what happens if (science forbid!) the service closes? Your data is gone with them.

Luckily, services running on the web are more and more providing your data back to... you. In research for this article I looked at the possibilities of Facebook and came up with a decent way to revive my personal site, giannopoulos.info. Facebook provides an RSS feed of my posted items. With the help of Feedburner and some css I am able to post this feed my site as if it was it's actual content. And my site is updated whenever I add something new on Facebook. Of course at the moment you need to be a Facebook user to comment on my posted items but I could script an Essence module to import the data as actual blog entries and allow commenting by everyone.

Still, there is a long road ahead of us. Facebook for example doesnt have an RSS feed for photographs and when I tried to import the feed of ilovehotchocolate.com in my Facebook notes it worked once but then new entries were ignored (as opposed to being automatically imported).So what can you export from your favorite service or site?

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