Dear interactive web sites: please, stop the madness.

Yes, I love your site. Yes, I've spent a lot of time on your site, entering data. I've spent countless hours of my geeky, always-connected life typing in my resume, my cover letters, my movie and book collections, my wish lists and to-do lists. Book reviews. Movie reviews. Ratings and comments. Feedback and posts. Classified ads. Photo collections. Links and descriptions. Tagged things out the wazoo, I have.

In essence, I've helped to make your site what it is. In some cases I've provided you with content. In others, at the very least, I've supplied feedback data either personally or in aggregate form, to let you know how your system is working.

And I've blogged about you. Told the world how great you are, pointed my readers to you to see my links, descriptions, reviews, todo lists, wishlists. Pointed employers to my resumes and cover letters.

See what a great customer I am?

All I ask in return that you make available to me that which I have made available to you. Put another way...

Why don't you have an export function?

[And to be clear: RSS feeds are wicked and cool and sexy and thanks to those of you who give me feeds of my work. But unless I can get a feed with every single item, back and back and back, the RSS feed is never going to replace the export function. I mean hello? So not the purpose of RSS!]

I mean, it's simple, isn't it? One little query out of millions of queries you must process every day. Just ask for everything in some kind of basic structured form, where user=Angie. Shoot it out to a text file. Let me download the file, or heck, just shoot the results to my browser. If I'm advanced enough to want an export, odds are I know what to do with raw text dumped to my screen.

I know, I know. You're worried. Worried that opening up the data formats of your exports might mean your competitors can build an import engine, to help people convert. Maybe you're worried that if I can take my data and go anywhere, I'll do so and leave you without a second glance.

However, you're forgetting just one thing. The amount of time I've invested in you means I already believe in you. Believe that the time spent on your site already means I'm not likely to leave. But even if I were... letting me take my data with me when I go will just make me think that much better of you.

Maybe it will convince me to stay. Tell my friends about you. And believe me, they'll be much more likely to take you on once they realize that all the typing and clicking they're about to do on your site will not be forever locked away in a proprietary database.

Please, dear interactive web site: if you want me to play, let me see my toys and take them home with me at the end of the day. Thank you.

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