One of the vagaries of cloud computing is that when you choose to host your pictures, files, and so forth with an organisaton you never know where that company is going to end up in the future, and subsequently what the future holds for your files.
Take BubbleShare, one of the earlier Web 2.0 photo sharing sites. Today BubbleShare announced it was shutting down and that you have until November 15 to download your albums or they’re gone.
BubbleShare was acquired in 2007 by fellow Canadian company Kaboose for $2.25 million. Kaboose was then acquired by Disney Online in April this year. But if you thought having all your photos under the Disney umbrella meant they were in safe-keeping then think again. By now, Disney would have completed a review of the Kaboose assets and it seems its first point of order is to shut BubbleShare.
If I’d been entrusting my photos to BubbleShare over the last five years or so, I’d be pretty peeved with Disney right now.
Filed under: Web 2.0
This underlines the biggest problem with any kind of Web 2.0 or cloud service: can you trust these people with valuable data over the long term?
Call me old fashioned but I’m still backing everything up to two external hard drives as well as two separate cloud services.