Nothing stopping Google, Twitter and all those other sites from turning around one day and saying nah, actually we've changed our business plan and will no longer offer X service.
Sheesh! You all act like when/if that were to happen, they would do so immediately, without any notice. First, I think it's unlikely to happen the way you're fearing. Google, for example, would catch hell for something like that, so it wouldn't be worth it to them. Just look at Wave. That wasn't even a success, and they announced its death nearly six months in advance in order to give people enough time to get whatever they needed out of it.
I'm not naive, I know that I'm putting my data in someone else's control, and I know a large number of people on this forum hate that idea. That's fine, I'm not going to convince you, but sometimes I think you guys are a little
too scared of these services.
And I don't care if you call it the "cloud" or not. It's just an easy way to refer to it. For crying out loud, it's just a term!
GMail, of all the services they have, is probably the easiest to get the data in and out. You can simply access it with a POP3 email client and download everything, or connect with IMAP and drag and drop all your email over, and you can export your contacts.
For that to actually be guaranteed useful though, you need to be getting your data out now on a regular basis.
That's why, if you're one of these people always expecting the sky to fall, you
can work with a desktop client using POP.
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