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."

Comments

Re:what exactly is the point of this?

[aug24]

I upload photos from my current phone. I used to upload from my old phone. Sometimes from my real camera, via my macbook.

I'd quite like to have all my statuses and discussions easily convertable to a journal.

I think an export/import facility should be standard, normal, required functionality.

FTA:

The idea isn’t that they want you to transfer your data away from Google — they just think it’s important that you can

Hear, hear!

Re:what exactly is the point of this?

[MightyYar]

it's not like facebook is holding a master copy of my data and not like there are any competitors to facebook right now

There are other social networks... LinkedIn, MySpace, Classmates, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

If there was a service where I could keep all of my data up-to-date in a single place and then update the other sites periodically, that might appeal to me. Especially if it were done in a nice way. Facebook is a good "general" site, but Flickr is better for photos and Last.fm is better for music and MySpace is better for flipping out your browser with crappy Javascript. My point is that if there were a "general" site like Facebook that could act like a central repository feeding (and receiving from) the specialty sites, that might be something worth using.