A cautionary tale
I thought I should share an experience my friend Amanda had the other day when she was trying to access the wiki for a workgroup she's a part of. This is a great example of why we have to be careful when choosing technologies hosted by an external company:
Anyone remember Stikipad, the free, hosted wiki solution? Yeah, I did too. Well, guess what? They upped and disappeared.
Yes, this probably happens in the land of web 2.0 all the time, but here’s the rub: the Emerging Technologies Group at MPOW used Stikipad as our documentation wiki and I did that thing I always warn people not to do when using free online tools: I didn’t back things up. It looked like things were going downhill for them some time ago, but as it happens, I didn’t have need to check out old meeting minutes for months, and when I tried to access them recently, I was rudely confronted with a DNS error page. And, no, I didn’t receive a single heads-up message from them warning of their imminent closure.
Apparently Stikipad did come back to life after this, but it is a great reminder to all of us who are using externally hosted services. A lot of tools like del.icio.us and PBWiki allow users to back up their content and that may be an important feature to look for depending on the project you're using the technology for. But not only do we need the backup feature, but we need to remember to back things up!
