Google's Data Liberation Front Delivers Takeout

Posted 06/30/2011 at 9:42am | by Pulkit Chandna

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Google+, or Google Plus, has been a hot talking point ever since it was formally announced earlier this week. All this initial interest in the company’s latest social networking effort is not difficult to fathom either. Generally, when something like this is announced a lot of other things tend to take a back seat. That’s what happened with Google Takeout, another much awaited service from the Internet giant that was, interestingly enough, announced on the same day as Plus.

Takeout is the first product from Google’s Data Liberation Front team, an engineering group tasked with the goal of making “it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." That is indeed its raison d'être, even though its name might make it seem like some sort of brutal guerrilla outfit.

“Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. Moreover, you’ll find that all your data is in portable and open formats‚ so it’s easy to import to other services quickly,” the Data Liberation Outfit said in a blog post.

At launch, Takeout only supports five Google services: Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa, Profile and Stream. But the outfit says support for other products is on the way.