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Google has recently added a feature that lets you decide what happens when you no longer use your account. It's called Inactive Account Manager and the goal was to offer a feature that tells Google "what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account".

You need to set a timeout period (3/6/9/12 months), add your phone number and contact details for up to 10 trusted friends or family members (email addresses and phone numbers), then decide if you want to share Google Takeout for services like Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube with those people and delete your account once it's inactive. Google will alert you one month before the timeout period expires.


It's a feature that seems to be useful if you want Google to automatically delete your account when you're no longer alive and share some data with the people you trust. Unfortunately, not all the Google Takeout data is easy to use. YouTube videos, Picasa photos, Drive files and Gmail's contact files are easy to open, but the data from Google+, Blogger, Reader is more difficult to read. When you set up this feature, you can pick the services you want.

You can also use the Inactive Account Manager just to notify friends and family members that you no longer use that account or to send an automated response to all incoming Gmail messages once your account becomes inactive.

When Google Reader dropped support for the built-in sharing features and integrated with Google+, the settings page added a long list of JSON files you could save to your computer to export your followers, the items you've shared or starred, your notes and more. Until then, you could only export your subscriptions.


Now all these files can be downloaded from Google Takeout, a service that lets you export data from Google+, Google Drive, Google Contacts, Picasa Web, YouTube and more. Reader is probably the only Google service that sends users to Google Takeout to export data.


Unfortunately, you need to download 8 files even if you only want to export the subscriptions OPML file. Google has to create a ZIP archive first, so you'll have to wait a lot more. Instead of downloading a small XML file, you need to download a large archive (34MB for my account). That's a general issue with Google Takeout, which only lets you download all your YouTube videos, all your Picasa Web photos, all your Google Drive files.

Another service recently added to Takeout is Google Latitude. You can download a JSON file with your location history data.

Let's hope that developers will create cool apps that parse these JSON files and make them more useful. Maybe Google should also offer human-readable formats like HTML.

{ via Data Liberation Blog. Thanks, Herin. }

YouTube lets you download the videos you've uploaded to the service, but the feature has a lot of limitations. "You can download MP4s of your own uploads, so as long as they do not have any copyrighted content or an audio track added through the Audio tool." But that's not all: "there is a limit of two downloads per hour for downloading your video to MP4. The Download MP4 button will not appear next to your videos if you've already downloaded two videos in an hour."


The limitations are absurd, considering that they are your videos and you've uploaded them. There are many services and apps that let you download any YouTube video, but they break YouTube's terms of services.

Fortunately, Google's Data Liberation launched a much better feature in Google Takeout: download the original videos you've uploaded to YouTube with one click. That's right, no more limitations, you can download all your videos and it's the only way to get the original versions, not the videos transcoded by YouTube. "No transcoding or transformation - you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out," explains Google.


Hopefully YouTube doesn't find out about this feature and cripple it with some preposterous limitations.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Takeout supports a new service: Google Docs. Now you can use the same interface to batch export your documents.


I tried both Google Takeout and the built-in feature from Google Docs that lets you download your documents. Even if they have the same purpose, they're quite different. The Google Docs feature is more flexible: you can choose to download only spreadsheets or presentations and skip all the other documents. You can also skip the files uploaded to Google Docs and not converted to a Google Docs format (for example: PDF files, archives and video files). Google Takeout has a "configure" feature, but you can't skip one or more document types. Another subtle difference is that Google Takeout lets you export only the files that you own, while Google Docs exports all the files from your account.


How to export all your files from Google Docs? Just go to the Google Docs homepage, select one or more documents, click "More" and then "Download", click the "All items" tab, pick your favorite formats and click "Download". The process is not that intuitive and you shouldn't have to select a file to see the download option.

{ via Data Liberation Blog }