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  The Data Liberation Front (DLF), a left-wing guerrilla group of Googlers, has finally launched its first service: Google Takeout. Just sign in, select which Google services you want to back up, and then click Creative Archive. Each of the services will be tidily backed up to a zip file in open formats that can be imported into other, non-Google web services. To start with, Takeout only supports the easy exporting of Buzz, Picasa, your Google Profile, Contacts, and Circles — Google’s recently-launched Facebook competitor — but the eventual plan is to provide easy exporting for every Google service. If you haven’t heard of them before, the DLF is a group and a website that helps you extract your data from Google’s web services into open, easily-transferable file formats. You can then take your email or docs or RSS feeds and import them into an installed program, or Microsoft or Yahoo’s equivalent web service. Curiously enough, though, the DLF is an engineering team ...

  Google +1, the social recommendation feature that lets users indicate their favorite pages, is picking up steam. Google is continuing to push the feature – in both its webmaster button form and the social search results connected to +1s – by releasing the feature in numerous additional countries. +1's Increasing Momentum The thought that Google +1 was part of a larger social construct has gained both more weight and some contradictory evidence with the release of Google+ – the actual Google social site that we've been bleeding for over the last year (editor's note: check back for more coverage on Google+ later today on Search Engine Watch). While +1s are likely to get an integration with the Google social network, much in the same way that Facebook Likes are integrated with the Facebook news stream, the +1 feature is also meant to stand alone. The +1 experiment started in March, webmasters got the button to add to their site earlier this month, Google has ...

  With Google+, it looks like the search giant may have finally built a social product that people will use. Shortly after Google announced the new social networking service, executives Bradley Horowitz and Vic Gundotra (who are leading the company's social efforts) spoke with Adweek about the lessons they've learned from past failures, both inside and outside Google. The company's most infamous social fumble was its product Google Buzz, which many users saw as a violation of their privacy—as did the Federal Trade Commission. Horowitz said that's symptomatic of of larger problem that he called "overfriending": When you're friends with too many people on a service like Facebook, then you don't want to share anything private. Google+, on the other hand, introduces the idea of Circles. Users divide their connections into categories like "friends" and ...