In a move that should be regarded as sound business sense from one of the largest companies in the world, Google will be closing the Jaiku and Dodgeball services in the near future. While I don't want to dwell on those specific cases (although both have been sidelined by the Mountain View company since they were purchased), it's an interesting warning signal for those of us who wish to live in the clouds and rely on hosted web services.

By relying on services that are not under your control, you are placing a certain amount of trust in the organisation behind it. In these tough economic times, your use of a service that may have a very small user base, bring in little revenue, but still cost the parent company to keep it running (such as engineering and staffing costs, bandwidth, server resources) is treading on thin ice.  For the service host, between keeping individuals happy, or keeping a company afloat (or simply reducing the rate they spend money on a developing service – the burn rate) the choice is a relatively clinical one.

Throw in all the economic uncertainty in the world and there are going to be a lot of hard decisions to be made at large companies. Mid and lower tier services will be in a trickier situation. Google at least can fall back on search and advertising to tide over services that are getting established, but even AdSense revenue rates are down over the last two reported quarters.

All About Symbian's Jaiku account could disappear

The small and agile internet start-up that doesn't have a huge war chest of cash from VC money pre-crash is either going to have to live frugally or shut up shop. If you're using a service like that, be aware you might get thrown out of the service with little notice. When Twitter bought Values of N (owners of I Want Sandy), users of the latter service were given two weeks notice that Sandy would be switched off.

So what does it mean for the smartphone industry, and Symbian in particular? Well, if you trust Nokia to not disappear and zap the Ovi service, then not much. The problem is that I can be a cynical sod sometimes, and while it's fantastic that devices like the N85 are able to make great use of online services to enhance the device, I still have a hesitancy to trust them 100%.

A practical example here is the Nokia Lifeblog service – the company line is that this is replicated by Nokia Photos (and enhanced with Share on Ovi) but there are many of us who miss Lifeblog, and miss a number of features on the handset, and also the way the PC counterpart works is different between Photos and Lifeblog. Try searching now for Lifeblog on Nokia... even heading to the original landing page you'll get directed back to Nokia Photos. It's like Lifeblog never existed.

Well it still exists on my PC and my N95.

While the corporate version may be gone, the personal copy remains, and that is my big point for you all to take away. While the cloud is all very nice, and is a boon for self publishers, information sharing and over the air synchronisation, never lose sight that the person your data is most precious to, is you. And it is you who should be safeguarding it.

Your pictures may have been synced to Ovi Share, but that's no excuse to not back them up to your PC or Mac (and then back them up to a DVD). Your address book and calendar should be stored locally as well – even if it is the Nokia phone's backup file, or a sync to a local copy of Outlook that you only use for that failsafe purpose. And so on.

Loosing an online service can hurt – but there are usually alternatives. The catch is getting your data into the new service. Mind you, in a recession with lots of spare (and smart) programmers and developers, any new service should have plenty of import options. But you need to have the data to import.

Be smart, preserve your own data, and keep it under your control.

-- Ewan Spence, Jan 2009.