I hate April Fools Day on the internet. I keep reading blog posts, forgetting what day it is, and reacting in amazement or anger for a while until I realize what happened.

It’s also annoying when actual products get released on April 1… for example, Gmail was released on April 1, 2004, and it doubled its storage limit exactly one year later.

Granted, there have been some really funny jokes online for 4/1, but there are so many bad ones that it just isn’t worth it, I think.

I’ve been using last.fm to keep a log of all the music I listen to for a while. It generates some cool lists so I can analyze what my favorite artists are and stuff, which is nice. You can see my user page here, if you’re curious. It doesn’t reflect my current musical interests since I had taken a moderate hiatus from the site, but I digress.

I realized that I could do some cool stuff with access to this data. For example, I’d like to see a graph showing my listening to different artists over time. If I had the data, I could do this, but I can’t seem to find a way to get it. They have an API that can give me recent data or top *, but there’s no way for me to wholesale download the data that I gave them.

This is really frustrating, and locks me into their service, because it’s the only one that has two years of my data. Lame.

Here are some other web apps that I use that lock me in:
- Google Reader doesn’t give me access to the data behind my reading trends. My reading list is exportable, though, and that’s far more important.
- Yahoo Mail charges extra for POP3 access, which is what you’d use to export your mail. They have an API for mail now, but the limits prevent a wholesale export, as far as I know.
- Google Talk chat history doesn’t seem to be downloadable yet.
- Probably more that I can’t think of right now.. what am I forgetting?

Matt Cutts wrote a good collection of methods for exporting your data from Google apps a little while ago.

Livejournal lets me download all my data, which is cool… maybe I’ll download it and do something cool with it sometime.