Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.
The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page. You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.
For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.
We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.
You: A Blogger or Google+ Page owner who dreams of controlling their data.
Us: A band of engineers who will stop at nothing to make your dreams come true.
Meet us at https://www.google.com/takeout, and together we will export each of your blogs as an Atom Xml file. Or, if you’ve enjoyed exporting data from your Google+ Stream and Google+ Circles through Takeout in the past, but are looking for something more, join us now and download html files with your posts and json files containing the circles for each Google+ Page you own. If you don’t want to rush into things, we can also just export a single blog or page of your choice. Either way, give us a try. Life will never be the same.
Posted by Kári Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front
Starting today, you'll have a couple of new features to make it even easier to download your data.
First, your original folder hierarchy is now maintained if you export files from Google Drive. Gone are the days of looking at the contents of your zip file and wondering which "secret_plans" file is which.
Your folder hierarchy is preserved.
Second, you can now pick a single resource within a service to download - for instance, a single Picasa album or top-level folder from Drive - instead of exporting every single file. To try it out, go to the "Choose services" tab and click on "Configure..." once you've added a service that supports this.
Want to download only your nefarious plans and all of your pictures of cats? We've got you covered!
These are just a few things that we've been working on lately. Stay tuned for lots of excitement in 2013!
Posted by Nick Piepmeier, The Data Liberation Front
We're always working to improve our tools and make it easier for users to control and access their data. Today we are happy to add support for two new services in Google Takeout.
Latitude: Download a json file with your location data.
Reader: You can already export your data within Reader. Now that functionality comes to Google Takeout. Export an xml file of your subscriptions and your lists of starred, shared, following (and more) items in json format.
Posted by Kári Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front
Your Takeout menu is growing. Today's entrée: YouTube videos. Previously, you've been able to download individual transcoded videos from your YouTube Video Manager. But starting today, you also have a more efficient way to download your videos from YouTube. With Google Takeout, you can download all of the original videos that you have uploaded in a few simple clicks. No transcoding or transformation -- you’ll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out.
It’s been easy to liberate your Google Docs in lots of different formats for awhile now -- ODT, PDF, RTF, Text, Word, HTML -- you name it. Starting today, you can export them along with everything else on the Google Takeout menu.
Choose to download all of the Docs that you own through Takeout in any of the formats mentioned above. We’re making it more convenient for you to retrieve your information however you want -- you can even Takeout just your docs if you'd like. Lastly, be sure to click on the new "Configure" menu if you'd like to choose different formats for your documents.
Enough of these goofy videos for Google Takeout. It’s time for an instructional screencast video instead.
This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP. All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP.
We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use.
If you already use IMAP to synchronize your Gmail account to a local device, enabling this new chat log export is as simple as clicking on the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings.
If you use Google Voice to manage your phone-life, we’ve got some good news: your data -- from call history, to voicemail (including transcripts!), to greetings and recordings -- is now available in Google Takeout. Starting today, you can download a copy of all your voice communications along with data from other products with one click. Voicemail messages and greetings are exported as mp3s, text messages as microformatted html, and forwarding phone numbers as a vcard.
Give it a shot, either with all your Google Takeout data, or by itself.
One more product liberated - and many more to go!
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
We're happy to announce a new open source application that allows you to import and export your Google Tasks, called Google Tasks Porter.
Google Tasks Porter is designed with other applications that contain task lists in mind. It supports import and export via the iCalendar format which is used by a variety of applications, including iCalendar itself. It also supports import and export to Microsoft Outlook via a CSV format. Additionally, Google Tasks Porter supports export from Remember the Milk using its iCalendar export, and import to Remember the Milk via email. You can also download a list of all your tasks in an HTML format which is designed to be portable and parseable.
Google Tasks Porter allows you to create a set of "snapshots" of your data, each representing a list of all your tasks at a particular point in time. You can then save or delete these snapshots, and you can export a snapshot at any time to another application using any of the available formats. You can also upload an ics or csv file in order to import the tasks contained therein into Google Tasks.
When we started the Data Liberation Front in 2007, we encouraged everyone to ask three questions about the products they were using:
Can I get my data out at all?
How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
But we forgot an important detail: the ability to do something useful with the data once you take it out. With that in mind, we’ve modified our first question to emphasize the importance of being able to download your data in an open, interoperable, portable format:
Can I get my data out in an open, interoperable, portable format?
How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
What we mean by open, interoperable and portable is that your data should be exported in a format that is:
Publicly documented and non-proprietary (i.e. it does not require a commercial license to use)
Easy for engineers to write a program that can import the data into another system
Your data isn’t really liberated unless you can put it to use somewhere else. Making sure you can do that when you liberate from Google products is now officially part of our mission.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
Two and a half weeks ago, we launched Google Takeout, and the response has been overwhelming: you want more data in Google Takeout! Well, we’ve heard you, and have a little more data to tide you over for now: Takeout now includes a list of the websites that you’ve +1’ed.
We’ve still got plenty more data to liberate -- including +1’s on stream posts and comments -- but we just wanted to give you a quick update.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
Since we began in 2007, the Data Liberation Front has been focused on one thing: making it easier for you to take your data in and out of Google. Our first step was to make it easier to get your data out of our products, one product at a time. While we’ve made great progress on this front, we’ve been on the lookout for even better ways to let you take your data out of Google.
Today we’re pleased to announce the Data Liberation Front’s first revolutionary product: Google Takeout.
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.
Today, we’re launching with five products:
These are just the beginning: we will be adding more Google products as time goes on, so stay tuned. For now, check out the settings menu in Google+ or visit google.com/takeout to give Takeout a try.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
This week Google Alerts joins the expanding group of liberated Google products by launching a feature that allows you to export your alerts. You can now access all the data about your alerts (search terms, type, etc.) in CSV format.
After talking about Data Liberation on This Week in Google, we've gotten a lot of requests for Data Liberation stickers. Well, if you want to become a member of the Data Liberation cooperative, we've got eggzactly what you're looking for, so to find out how to get a sticker, read on!
Our stickers are gorgeous full-color 3" x 5" vinyl stickers that look just as good on a laptop as they do on an egg carton, and if you'd like to get one, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:
The Data Liberation Front c/o Google 20 W. Kinzie, Floor 9 Chicago, IL 60610
Our lawyers told us that, unfortunately, we can't ship these stickers outside of the United States. Also, we won't be collecting your addresses for any purpose whatsoever--they're going right into the shredder for use as bedding in the henhouse!
The only thing that you need to send us is a self-addressed stamped envelope. If you're so inclined (and this is completely optional), drop in a postcard from your city and we'll add it to the collage on the wall of our barn (and we'll post pictures of it from time to time).
Of course--and this is also completely optional--we'd love to see the stickers in action, so once you get the sticker, please send a tweet to @dataliberation with a picture of the sticker at its new home--like this:
And lastly, no chickens were harmed in the production of these stickers. (although we did have a few nice omelets with hash browns. Mmmmm.... hash browns....)
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
All your docs at once -- Today the Google Docs team is rolling out an upgrade to the bulk export feature launched in October. You can now export all of your documents (up to a maximum zip file size of 2 gigabytes) without having to scroll down to select them all. See Vijay's blog post for more information, plus some other useful features also being rolled out.
Chrome bookmarks -- We've been meaning to post a link to Kevin Tofel's post of a month ago explaining how to use Google Docs bulk export to share your Chrome bookmarks with other browsers. This was a feature that my colleague JJ Lueck quietly added, and we're thrilled that the world has noticed!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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
