Chris Brogan has a blog post about his colleague Nick Saber, who got locked out of Google: "Sorry, your account has been disabled."
This is devastating not because of the loss of an email account (and Gmail can be backed up by forwarding and/or POP3) but because of the use of a single ID to access multiple services: it's dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. As the story points out:
Suddenly, Nick can't access his Gmail account, can't open Google Talk (our office IM app), can't open Picasa where his family pictures are, can't use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.
OK, so it creates a small storm in the Google-obsessed teacup that is the blogosphere, but there is nothing new about it. It probably happens to hundreds of people every day, if we include not just Google but Yahoo, Microsoft and all the little "cloud based" companies. This is something I keep writing about, most recently here: Never assume your data is safe, even if it's online.
Look, if you have data online, you can lose access to it at any second, through hacking, an idle whim, a simple mistake, or some financial or even natural disaster. In fact, calling it "the cloud" is a good metaphor, because it's insubstantial and easily blown away. It's not Google's fault, it's the nature of the beast.
Sure, "the cloud" will work for most people most of the time, but (as with Windows) if you have a lot of users, you'll get a lot of errors. With a billion users, 10% having problems -- which they probably will, over 10 years -- is 100 million personal disasters.
But the bottom line is this: if you lose access to your data because it only exists in one online service, it's not Google's fault, it's yours. Deal with it.
