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Vicki Davis, over on her blog, bemoans the closure of Lively. The Google blog contains this very helpful advice: "We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms." Now that's data portability for you.

As I've said before, using someone else's "free" service is a risk, analogous to crashing on someone's couch rent-free. While it can be useful, and even fun, as a short term getaway, it's not particularly viable as a long term strategy. And if you have student work hosted on such a service, and you haven't asked how to move that work in the case of a loss of service, you should examine your process of technology integration.

Earlier this week, Chris Sessums had some insights on this issue as well, as he described some of the problems users have faced with the Edublogs service. When you are using someone else's service, you are using it on their terms.

Of course, an easy fix is to host your own tools using open source components that run on open standards. My question: how many closures/abuses of trust will it take for schools to get serious about controlling their own data, and their own infrastructure?