Why backup your email? from BackupMy. Net on Vimeo.

BackupMy.Net is a service that allows individuals to back up their tweets, email accounts, blogs and photos. Rather than having to install or configure files for backup, the Austin-based service offers users the chance to store their online data in the cloud. As illustrated by their above email service video, Backupmy.Net may be invaluable in protecting users from accidental deletions, service suspension and outages. While RWW would never suggest you store your passwords in your emails, there is some merit to the service. The blogging and email backup service is particularly useful when you're working with clients who are less than tech-savvy and prone to deleting their files. Similar cloud-based services include Lifestream Backup, Mozy and Memopal.

As for the Twitter back up service, BackupMyTweets is fast to index files and offers users the chance to download their backed up tweets in HTML, JSON or XML format. Nevertheless, one of our biggest complaints with this service is that it auto-tweets a message to your friends upon joining. Love it or leave it, at least Spymaster offers you in-game points to pimp its service to your friends. If BackupMyTweets allowed users to choose to tweet about the service in exchange for discounts on premium offers, the Twitter message might not feel like such an intrusion. Once they overcome the automated Twitter spam issue, the service as a whole will likely prove a useful tool for those looking to store 3rd party hosted materials.

Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.

Pi Looks Cool

The storage side of this arrangement, Mozy, is interesting because the company has almost one million customers and has been innovating in its marketing and services for some time. Much more interesting, though, is Maritz's stealthy former company Pi. Now a part of the new company Decho, Pi's web site contains little more than a tasty description of an unlaunched data-centered personal information service. The site says Pi intends to build on the metaphors of search, subscription, aggregation and publishing for both manual and automatic consumption.

See this paragraph, for example:

"One of the failings of today's tools is that it is hard to get back the complete context of a task. Think of being in a meeting and all the items of information that are relevant: presentations, a list of attendees, private notes by you, notes you wish to share, notes by others, action items. Today it is surprisingly cumbersome to capture all this information in a way that is easy to get back to, and if needs be share with others.

At Pi we intend to solve this problem."

API Level Innovation

Not much is known about what services Decho will create when Mozy and Pi are brought together, but the following slide from the PR deck sure looks interesting.

Though vague, that looks pretty hot to us. It looks like a turnkey point of entry for a whole world of innovation built on top of our aggregated personal data. Presumably the security emphasis found on the Pi site and in online storage service Mozy will carry though here, so Decho will allow for data owners to have complete control over access.

We don't know for sure what to expect, but we'll be watching Decho and the surrounding ecosystem of services closely in coming months.