Pezholio

Well, it happened. today, the Royal Mail have issued ernestmarples.com with a takedown notice, demanding that the service be taken down immediately under pain of legal action.

For those of you who don’t know, Ernest Marples was / is a system that provided not-for-profit sites (such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com, Planning Alerts and, by extension Twitterplan) with latitude and longitude data from postcodes, which means that people can get information about their areas with only their postcode.

Because Ernest Marples has been served with this notice, none of these sites can function, meaning the Royal Mail (who are *supposed* to be a public service) are directly responsible for taking away a wealth of useful tools from the public it’s *supposed* to serve.

Judging by the Andrew Beeken

October 5th, 2009 at 9:40 pm

As always, much better articulated than my effort – you also get bonus points for a better graphic! However, the point of my post still stands in that this is an example of the bad side of relying on third party, cloud based apps for service delivery – when they go belly up, you may not be losing out on a paid for service, but you are left picking up the pieces. That said, I still think they are the future – they just need stronger foundations and support from big backers (in this case the Royal Mail) to succeed – that and the big corporations need to buck up their ideas and change their perspective on data…