The Data Liberation Front applauds the new Google Dashboard launched today. Transparency and control over your data is critical in the world of cloud computing. This new dashboard provides a world of information about your data in a very simple way. Take a moment today to try it out. You may just discover a few things you never knew about how you use Google.

To learn more about the Google Dashboard, see the post on Google's Official Blog.

Posted by JJ Lueck, Data Liberation Front

A couple weeks ago, the Google Docs team launched a multi-file uploader to make it much easier for you to put files into the cloud. Today we're launching a new feature to make it much easier to get your content out: "Convert, Zip and Download."

Select one or more files and then click on "Export" from the "More Actions" menu. Next, pick the format (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word, etc) you want for your exported files. Finally, click "Continue" and we'll give you a nice zip file to download that has all your content.

For now, you can "export" up to 500 MB of content in a single zip file, which is over 20,000 typical files. Sometimes it takes us a few minutes to export really large amounts of files, so instead of making you wait, we added an "Email when ready" option. We'll send you a link when the zip file is ready.



Give it features a whirl and let us know what you think.

Posted by Luke Blanshard and JJ Lueck, The Data Liberation Front

Check out the video that shows you how to export data from AdWords over on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation Front

When we asked you what services you'd like to see liberated, Gmail came up several times. I have good news! Some of those requests are already available. Probably the best way to get your mail out of Gmail is with IMAP. A great place to start learning about IMAP is in the Gmail Help Center at

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725.

There are many IMAP clients available, but I like Thunderbird. It has the added bonus of being open source. Once you connect it to your Gmail account there are a lot of things you can do.

Andy asked to be able to

"Export Gmail email to mbox file. Even better if you can choose to just export messages with a given label, or those matching a search."

We don't have a great answer for the search part of your question, but with thunderbird, exporting a label is easy. Just right-click the folder (labels appear as folders in Thunderbird) and choose 'Import/Export' > 'Export folder.' By default Thunderbird exports messages as .mbox files.

Ludovic PIOT asked:

"We need to be able to import any ThunderBird or Apple Mail archived e-mails into our GMail account."

Once you have the data in Thunderbird, you can drag and drop folders straight onto the [Gmail] folder. Thunderbird will create a new label for you and populate it with the messages from the folder you dragged over.

Jorijn Smit asked for

"The ability to merge gmail accounts into one. I have a couple of addresses and it would be great if all these boxes could be merged. Not as in one accounts that checks mail of the other but full intergration of all apps."

For your Gmail messages you can connect both accounts to Thunderbird and drag and drop the messages from one account to the other. Remember to bring your filters to your new account too -- you can learn more about that at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-filter-importexport.html.

There are lots of other ways to get at your Gmail data with an IMAP client like Thunderbird. Feel free to post your experiences and further questions as comments.

Daniel - First Colonel in the Data Liberation Front

Yesterday, in the process of adding additional security measures to Orkut Friends Export, we inadvertently introduced a bug that prevented users from exporting their contacts (instead, they were redirected to their Orkut home page). This bug was fixed this morning before 11AM CDT and users can once again export their contacts by going to their Friends page and clicking on the export button. I'd like to apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused for Orkut users.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to reiterate our commitment to our users: You should be able to control the data you store in any of Google's products, and we will continue to work to make it easier for you to move your data in and out of our products. If, in the future, you encounter any issues with import or export from Google products, please don't hesitate to let us know. You can reach us on Twitter at @dataliberation.


Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation Front

Google Sites allows users to create and host a vast array of content in a central location. For that reason, it was critical to the Data Liberation Front that data be able to move freely in and out of the product. Today, we launch an import/export tool that can transfer data in and out of Sites as standard XHTML. This tool is built on the Google Sites Data API, which allows for more sophisticated liberation solutions as well. Head over to the Google Data API Blog to read the full announcement.

These tools are available for consumers and enterprise customers today and we look forward to feedback.

I remember the first time I heard Google's CEO Eric Schmidt speak back in 2004. He wrapped up his talk to employees by clearly stating that Google didn't lock its users in. He stressed that we didn't want people to use our products solely because they can't get their data out to switch to a competing service.

It was with this in mind that I started Google's Data Liberation Front two years ago in our Chicago office. We're a small team of Google engineers that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services, by building simple import and export functions. I wanted to make sure that users (myself included, as a consumer of Google products!) always had a choice.

For example, Let's say you want to switch from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail. Here's what you do to import your data:

1. Open your Gmail account. Go to Settings.
2. Click on the "Accounts and Import" Tab and then the "Import mail and contacts" button and follow the directions

But what if you've decided that you don't want to use Gmail anymore? No problem. Just click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. Not only can you have any new mail forwarded to your new account (for free), but you can also enable IMAP which makes it a piece of cake for other mail programs to access all of your Google mail.

Unfortunately, not all web services make it this easy for you to take your data out of their services. They charge you a fee or make you jump through technology hoops if you want to leave. But we believe that letting you leave our services easily actually helps us make those services better for you. Rather than locking in our users artificially, it makes us earn our users' loyalty by building great products and constantly improving them. If we stop making our products compelling and useful, we lose you as a user. It's just that simple.

We expect to use this blog to give tips and tricks on getting data in and out of Google products, as well as kudos and reviews for services supporting rich import/export features. We think that we can provide simple solutions for liberating/managing your data stored in the cloud, and let you voice your complaints about services that aren't properly liberated.

If you're looking for information on how to move your data in and out of a Google product, we've setup a website, http://www.dataliberation.org/, to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products.

If you'd like to contribute suggestions for services that you think need to be liberated, please do so on our Data Liberation Moderator page. We're also on Twitter @dataliberation.

Posted by Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation Front