Teleport your data with Google’s DataLiberation.org

Google has launched a new website it says helps consumers and businesses “free” data from online products.

Apparently, highlighting a commitment to user choice, Google has announced a new website, http://www.dataliberation.org , which provides information on how people can export and import their data quickly and easily from a growing number of Google products for use between Google’s products and those of competitors.

The website is managed by Google’s Data Liberation Front team, a small group of engineers that aims to make it easy for people to transfer their personal data in and out of Google’s services by building simple import and export functions.

“We believe that users — not products — own data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product at no additional cost,” remarked Brian Fitzpatrick, founder of the Data Liberation Front at Google.

“We want people to choose to use our products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.”

Over half of all Google products, from the popular blogging platform Blogger, to global email service Gmail™, have already been “liberated”, or engineered to make it easy for a user to export his or her data from the service. The team also announced today its intent to “liberate” its website creator tool Google Sites and batch document export in Google Docs in the upcoming months.

More at dataliberation.org
On Twitter: @dataliberation