It turns out reports of the Data Liberation Front demise have been greatly exaggerated. We are still very actively improving Google Takeout[0] as well as developing other products[1]. The thing that didn't last was running a quasi-official Twitter account, perhaps without official blessing.
Its true that the Data Liberation Front did start as a group of 20%ers, but like the much less successful GMail, we got turned in a real team and now we have reorgs and TPS and everything.
> The thing that didn't last was running a quasi-official Twitter account, perhaps without official blessing.
Running a quasi-official blog without blessing didn't last either [0]. Glad to hear the team got turned into a permanent one internally, but the lack of a public info on its existence doesn't fill me with confidence that this is something Google wants or prioritises at a management level.
The gp was talking about companies' engineers writing "user-friendly data-portability features. Across all product lines". Is that the case with Takeout at Google, or is it just a job given to one relatively small team of self-starters working on a project that was never spearheaded by management?
Its true that the Data Liberation Front did start as a group of 20%ers, but like the much less successful GMail, we got turned in a real team and now we have reorgs and TPS and everything.
[0] Check out the new My Activity service as an example of some of the new data we have added: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/my_activi...
[1] https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/12/09/google-unveils-gr...