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Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data
Several sources are reporting that The Data Liberation Front, a new engineering group within Google, is trying make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They have already "liberated" about half of Google's offerings (including Blogger and Gmail) and have plans to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs in the near future. "In a blog post this morning, Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy to explain why the company sees this is an important step: 'Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all. Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective.'"
A very smart move, if they really implement it as described.
But remember that there will be a price to pay : google may easily provide you with an export of all the information you gave them, but they will certainly keep a copy.
I went to their site... what a fake group, just a total front for google. Nowhere did I find a way to export the emails from gmail to .dbx files for Outlook/Express. So of all google's services, gmail is the most used, and of that service, the vast majority of its data is the emails themselves.
Yet, this largest volume from the largest service is not at all liberated. Liberation for that stuff is not even mentioned, not even on the map.