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Google Takeout Lets You Easily Export From Circles
An anonymous reader writes "If you ever wanted proof that Google's recently-launched Circles social network is angled as the antithesis of Facebook, check out Google Takeout. Produced by the Data Liberation Front, Takeout lets you export all of your data from Circles, Picasa, and Buzz in open formats that can then be imported into other, competing services."
it's not like facebook is holding a master copy of my data and not like there are any competitors to facebook right now
Buzz? - no one uses it
Picasa? - i have the master copies of all my photos
I was hoping that Google Takeout would let me easily eat Chinese food for lunch today =\
They changed the name from Google+ that quickly and quietly after announcing it?
Well, it's better than no change at all, I guess.
Now I'm left wondering why Google Takeout isn't a robodialer for Chinese food...
(The Jargon File once mentioned a potentially fictitious MIT AI Lab project to use text to speech to order pizza. Long live the space-cadet keyboard.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
do they mean google + ? neither circles.google.com nor google.com/circles yields anything
The Data Liberation Front (DLF), a left-wing guerrilla group of Googlers...
From the FAQ:
Why do you call yourselves "The Data Liberation Front"?
We started as an internal engineering team back in 2007 and couldn't agree on the name, so we came up with this name as an homage to The Judean People's Front, the splinter group in Monty Python's Life of Brian that spends most of its time bickering. In addition, we do see ourselves as being somewhat subversive, not so much within Google, but insofar as it's unusual for a big company to work to make it easier for their customers to leave them.
And now I do !1 Thanks, Teh Google, for taking my life life into your ever-knowing hands !!
I think an export/import facility should be standard, normal, required functionality.
Facebook already has this functionality and it works quite well. You can get an export of your wall and all of your photos. It comes as an HTML-formatted document and a folder of the pictures. Building a parser to grab the HTML document into a database or spreadsheet would be trivial.
"Google’s way of showing that the data it holds in its massive database is yours..."
In other words, Google want to be able to have deniability if your data is lost or traded to somebody else and it ends up getting shown to have originated from them. Google can claim it's users failed to secure it, and had the ability to release it everyplace.
Google has become notorious for abuse of information, and dispite their claim about this "left-wing guerrilla group" which is still a bunch of Google employees.
Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.
Google Takeout - lets you download all the data from google services that are almost completely unused in one easy step.
The Data Liberation group has a noble goal... but this is an incredibly lame step in that direction. Given how many years the group has been around, it is pretty sad that they've made such minor inroads. Perhaps this is the first real step in that direction... we'll see...
Try to export your account's contents from facebook. It will turn out that "only" friend comments are missing. Such a little detail. Want to see these dialogs again? Return to Facebook and increase ad views. Want to see these dialogs 500 pages back? Last time I checked, the "previous stories" link loops so that no older entries can be viewed at all.
I'm not knocking the ability to extract your data from the service -- it's all good.
But open up the inter-service protocols, so that competitors can slot into the infrastructure, and then I'd be impressed.
i.e. I'd like to be able to choose Flickr over Picasa, while continuing to use Circles and Buzz, without losing a sense of integration.
You can also do this in Facebook.
Account > Account settings > Download your information
It sends you an email with a link, which you can use to download a zipped archive with all your photos, postings, and comments
Building a parser to grab the HTML document into a database or spreadsheet would be trivial.
The other two replies point out that learning enough programming to build a parser in the first place might not be trivial. Moreover, it would appear to violate Facebook's terms of service, item 3.2: "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."
As a member of the Liberation Front of Data, the only people worse than Facebook are the Data Liberation Front.
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Facebook likes this!
'takeout' implies that you, like, take the data out--you don't, you get to have a copy of it--whoo hoo, you get to have a copy of your own data /taken out/ and until you can actually take your data all the way out--until you can log in to a service which shows all the data google have on you and lets you delete it as you see fit--their claims to be privacy-respecting are hot air
as long as google get to keep the data, too, there's nothing being
I thought this was in reference to Google's Demo for Circles, that matched meta-words from your chat history with local menus via GPS and google business listings. Since the circles demo is all about a group of people searching for a restaurant to eat at! I figured automatic ordering of food for take out was their facebook-killing app...
Today is the first day of Google+, Google's answer to Facebook.
I just thought I would mention it since I don't see news of it ( accept this thread ) on Slashdot and getting a story accepted on Slashdot is like winning the lottery.
I think I will forever be suspicious of Google due to the stunt they pulled last year with Buzz and censoring Tiannamen Square massacre information from Google China.
However, a CNet article I read stated that Google+ has better and simpler privacy. Hopefully competition from Google+ will force Facebook to do the same.
The story ran yesterday.
No, but her grand-kid could.
Not everybody has a programming grand-kid.
Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who does.
Again, not everyone knows a programmer, or even knows someone who does.
Pay attention to the products that DLF supports - nothing that isn't already easily exported, or that anyone cares that much about. The purpose of this marketing campaign is just to shore up Google's image as the opposite of Facebook - open and caring about your privacy. They want to use this image to push their Facebook alternative, Google Plus. Whether it is actually better with openness and privacy is yet to be seen.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Just go to your account settings and there's a link to download all your data in one ZIP file. I think there was a Slashdot article about this back then when they introduced it.
I can't wait to start circle jerking on google+!
Google's CEO publicly stated that they hadn't done enough to compete with Facebook (or in his words he "screwed up"). All you need to do is look at Google+'s interface to see that this social networking site directly answers the challenge set forth by Facebook. Facebook took Google's spot as the most visited site on the web, and to fight back they have basically create Facebook minus the flaws. They kept all the features and the style that Facebook users love, and dropped the crap. Not only can you export data, the privacy policy is (or attempts to appear to be) much shorter and simpler, and sharing isn't all or nothing, you can divide your life into circles.
http://ct.necs.la/ktgd7V
http://www.rakontu.org/
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."
My wife and I have been working on that. The first version was for Google App Engine, but our next version is being built for the deskop in Java using CouchDB for a backend (a backend that can be either server-based or peer-to-peer) that can also provide an RSS feed.
But, after a lot of time spent doing this for free, we need to raise some money to keep it going (like on the order of US$20K - US$40K to finish the next version of the design goals in the documents on that webpage). We've been talking about using Kickstarter. But maybe Diaspora has used up all the mindshare about that?
But in any case, my wife wrote a related blog post called "Steal these ideas":
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.
In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."
In any case, some people are trying. Maybe someday our society will have a "basic income" to ensure all people have more time for civic-minded pursuits if they are so inclined.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I cannot download my stuff. 3 other account can be downloaded with my browser,but my primary account just refuses to download. after finishing and entering the password it just says "You have no downloads.". The other accounts befin downloading instead :(
I think Google recognise the mistakes they made with Buzz and are smart enough not to repeat them or clear mistakes Facebook have made.