Google’s new social network “Plus,” is so exclusive that people can’t get in, but the search giant is already making it easy to get out — clearly taking a shot at Facebook’s policy of not letting users download their data to use on other sites.
Google’s Data Liberation Front, an internal engineering faction dedicated to letting users export data from Google services, released a tool Tuesday called Google Takeout. The service lets users export their contacts, their Buzz feed, Picasa web photo albums, their Google profile and their “Stream” (the equivalent of Facebook’s newsfeed) in a format readable by other social networks.
Facebook, by contrast, gave users the ability to export their photos and stream in October, but only as html files that users can save to their computer and browse. Facebook does not allow users to export their profile and contacts’ email addresses and phone numbers from Facebook, saying it would be a violation of user privacy to let you export your friends’ e-mail addresses.
That despite the fact that those addresses are visible to you, and that they can be exported to the e-mail systems of Facebook’s partners Yahoo and Microsoft. (Several workarounds exist, including a Chrome extension and exporting to Yahoo/Microsoft and then into Gmail.)
Facebook’s answer is that it has a way for users to share their data with other services — Facebook Connect — which lets you share information with other sites by signing on to those sites with your Facebook credentials.
But there’s no option to do that with Google+ and it’s not clear there ever will be — since the competitors to be your online identity hub will never trust the other.
Google would clearly love to let users move their connections from Facebook, which now boasts an estimated 700 million users, to its system, rather than forcing users to rebuild their social networks. Google picked a public fight with Facebook over the no-export policy in December, blocking Facebook from accessing users’ Gmail accounts to find new friends.
Google’s blocking of Facebook remains in place, and the only ways now to let Facebook comb through a Google contact list is to export a file from Gmail or from Google+.
Google Takeout works quickly, creating a zip file that users can download. Contacts are stored in Vcard formats, according to the groups you’ve put them in Gmail or Google+. The profile is exported as a JSON file that looks fairly simple to parse. The “Stream” will use HTML with special microformating.
It’s clear from Google’s announcement of the feature on day one that one of the fronts it will be fighting Facebook on is openness. And even if you have no interest in joining yet another social network, that battle is one that should be fought. After all, it is your data – or should be.
