Simon Phipps: “Stewart is spot-on with Flickr’s policy and paradoxically will keep my business by allowing me to leave at any time.”

Absolutely. This post nicely explains something I’ve noticed about my own actions recently, namely why I’ve remained a del.icio.us user even as I’ve become less than enthralled with its new owner: I can export my data at any time from del.icio.us and take it to a competing service. As Simon so eloquently explains, I remain a customer because it’s easy to stop being one. To compete, a rival service needs to not only provide a better product but also make it equally simple to take my business elsewhere, and most service providers don’t seem to be in any hurry to let me do that. Furthermore, the usual reasons for moving data elsewhere, better integration with other providers’ services or more compelling features in a competing service, are less important when the service I’m already using has an open, well-documented API that allows me to do whatever I want with my data without needing to export it.