Quartz by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. Flickr Hosted
I used to joke that the second feature to write is export. I don’t joke about it any more. Export is the 2nd feature you should implement for your software or web service.
There is nothing that says you care about your customers like making it easy for them to get their content out. Bonus points if you choose an export format that is already popular and well documented.
If you really love your customers, the exported data will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.1
That, of course, makes import the 3rd feature to write. Don’t support importing from competing applications until your product is ready, because migrating from another product is already a scary enough situation without finding yourself using a buggy, incomplete product.
- Chris Messina’s Identity is the Platform got me thinking more about this. [↩]
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We did imports way before we did exports in WordPress, but when we did exports we did something very right: we used them. If your exports aren’t used for something (we support importing them and recommend them as a way to move blogs) you don’t really have any incentive to make them better. It also proves that you can parse it.