What happens when a Web 2.0 site dies?

The Washington Post reported (found by way of Engadget) that Vongo, the all-you-can-view movie site run by Starz, has gone belly up.

I used Vongo a few times for various feature stories but never got hooked. (If you're wondering, journalists like me often test new services using a press account that expires after some period of time. For services like Rhapsody and Zune, I used them for the press trial and then decided to sign up and pay monthly. Why two music services? Why, one for my Creative Zen and one for my Zune, of course. And then there's my iPod, but we won't go into that redundancy here.)

Starz is just moving all the content over to the Verizon service called Starz Play. The catch is that you have to be a Verizon customer. If you're not, the Vongo service will go dark on September 1 and any movies you have downloaded and paid for (via the $10 monthly fee) will no longer be available.

Update: Vongo pointed out to me that you do not have to be a Verizon customer to use Starz Play. You just need a credit card. I agree with them that this means it is not a great example of what happens when a Web 2.0 site goes dark -- Vongo customers can just sign up for Starz Play and the fee is a few bucks less per month. However, they do have to go through that sign-up, re-download any movies, etc. It is not painless -- I would prefer that they do what Yahoo Music does: they just let you switch over to Rhapsody. That said, it is a reminder that sites like Yahoo Music and Vongowill not exist forever. I still feel sorry for the guy who sits down with buttery popcorn in front of his PC in October and finds out that all of the first-gen Diehard movies he painstakingly downloaded won't play anymore.

Side note: I used Yahoo Music for about year, so the thought of re-downloading all of that music is anathema to me at this point. It's almost as painful as the word anathema itself. Further side note: I learned another new word today: arrears. It means Vongo charges per month with no cancellation fee. Another way of saying that is: you have only paid for movies for a month, so carrying them over to the next month is just a nice perk. I could go on like this for a while so I will stop now.

It raises an interesting question: what rights do you have when a Web 2.0 site pulls the plug? What about all of that data on Plaxo, or your schedule on Zoho, or the accounting for your company on QuickBooks Online? If you read the terms of service closely at most sites, you'll find that - in most cases - your data is protected in terms of privacy but not necessarily from loss or damage. There is no service level agreement, and no contract that says the company must retain your data if they close up shop. In fact, as it relates to data protection, there is really no guarantee whatsoever, and you are on your own for back-ups. Ironically, this is not that different from what happens when a desktop software company closes its doors: they have no guarantees that they will keep providing the software.

The most public example of this has to do with older versions of Windows, which Microsoft tends to support long after they really should. Still, it's inevitable that all the Windows XP users who are resisting a Vista upgrade will be forced to someday. But we know Microsoft is not going anywhere anytime soon. With software, the risk is directly tied to the size of the company. I would trust my photos to a company like Adobe before I hand them all over to PhotosRUs.com (a site which, for some reason, does not exist). Internet archive sites are not going to help here, since they store just the front-end HTML files, not any back-end data. Back-ups are a nice idea, but sort of contrary to the whole idea of using the cloud.

The real solution is for Web 2.0 sites to follow Google's lead and make a true offline mode. Granted, for Vongo users, this would not help - they have rented the movies and the rentals should expire. But for my contacts, and schedule, and e-mail, and everything else, I want an automated offline mode.

Update: Plaxo does offer an offline sync mode.