StikiPad - When software in the cloud goes sour

For a long time I have been using a wiki service called Stikipad to jot down things I wanted to save for later; like business ideas, drafts for blog posts and presentations, stuff like that.

Unfortunately Stikipad has looked like this the last 2 weeks or so:

This essentially means I cannot get at my data and have not been able to for weeks now. As if that isn’t bad enough in itself, I don’t know squat about what is happening, why a data center move is taking weeks to complete, or when I might see my data again.

The sound of silence

The owners of Stikipad, Jonathan George and Matthew DeWaal, appear to have hid themselves behind a wall of silence which is even scarier – not to mention disrespectful to their customers.

While I can understand the sticky situation they might be finding themselves in, they need to pull their heads out their butts for a second and provide information to their customers. They haven’t answered emails, they don’t reply to comments, and their support site is down.

At least a thousand people used to have public wikis hosted with Stikipad and are now left with only a non-informative “We are moving data centers”. Fine, move data centers all you want, I really don’t care. But I do care about my data, which you are currently keeping away from me.

And to add insult to injury, Stikipad is apparently charging their customers for a non existant service.

If you’re using web applications…

There a couple of lessons to be learned here – both as a consumer and a producer of “cloud services”. To the consumers out there looking for the next new thing to make their online life easier, I say

• Don’t sign up for a service that doesn’t allow you to get your data out of the system in a structured way. To Stikipads credit, they did provide that feature, and I do have a fairly recent backup, so this is probably not a total disaster for me.
• Use that backup/export feature! Use it regularly and not only when you want to cancel your account – I did not, shame on me.

If you’re producing web applications…

The most important lesson for producers of web applications that deal with other peoples data – and I sure hope the Stikipad guys are taking notes here so they don’t end up accidentally screwing more people over – is that you need to always communicate. Especially in times of trouble. Set up a blog on one of the numerous blogging services or hook your company up with Get Satisfaction.

I don’t care how you do it, just don’t shut the fuck up.