Marco Arment on owning your data:

For something as important as email, I’ve never trusted everything to a proprietary provider. My email address has never ended in someone else’s domain name, and has never been hosted in any way that would preclude me from easily switching to another provider.

I’ve always been pretty blasé about my mail, and about where my other web content is. But recently I’ve been pondering whether that’s a good thing. My limited amount of tweets are somewhere in Twitter, my email is on Google, and even this blog is in a tumblr black hole.

Twitter in particular is getting attention, as commentators are seeing that all the content they’re creating on that service is increasingly unavailable, especially the older data that is outside the API reach. My own tweets are totally disposable, but the concept applies - how do you get at your content if it’s on a 3rd party?

If any of those services were to up and disappear, so would all my data. Not that it would matter too much, but maybe it’s time to start thinking about owning my own stuff.