We profiled Google's Data Liberation Front when the initiative was first made public last year, but what has Google's in-house data export team been up to since? Designing stickers, for one thing.

"CAGE FREE DATA," they proclaim, which sums up the Data Liberation Front's efforts succinctly. The team's goal is nothing less than to make it simple for people to leave Google's many services, taking e-mails, photos, and documents along with them.

Its most recent work has been on Google Docs, which now sports a batch download option. Select the documents you want, click a button, and Google will zip them all into one compressed archive of up to 2GB and mail them to you.

On a recent visit to Google's Chicago office, where the DLF team is based, we sat down with team leader Brian Fitzpatrick to talk more about how and why he wants to make it easy for people to abandon Google's services.

Stopping stagnation



Certainly there's PR value in hosting such a "not evil" initiative within the company, but DLF didn't begin life as a top-down project. Fitzpatrick says it "started off as naïveté" on his part; after listening to company president Eric Schmidt wax eloquent for years on the virtues of not locking users in, Fitzpatrick noted that not all of Google's products made this easy.

DLF was the result of his work. The team has been together for two years now, and although it began by seeking out other engineering teams, Fitzpatrick says that those teams are "now coming to us" to ask how they're doing.

Data lock-in isn't bad just for users; Fitzpatrick argues that it's also bad for Google. "If you create a user base that's locked in," he says, "there's no way you're not going to become complacent."

Making it as easy to leave Google Docs as to leave the Google search engine plays to one of Google's strengths: hiring really smart people. DLF's work "sets that fire under an engineering team," Fitzpatrick says, since the engineers need to keep users happy through innovation, not lock-in.

The DLF sticker

Do people actually care about liberating their data? Some do, but usage of the export features remains low. Google sees a "continuous low-level of use of these things," said one engineer on the team, especially when it chooses to shut down underperforming services. Having export tools actually makes it easier to do such shutdowns, too; recall that DRM-laden music stores ran into problems when they eventually tried to shut down their DRM servers. Google's data openness helps the company avoid this sort of public criticism in the event of service shutdowns, as when the company closed its Google Notebook product.

Nicole Wong, Google's Deputy General Counsel, told us separately that DLF matters to Google for two reasons: 1) it provides control to users and 2) "when we say our competition is one click away," initiatives like DLF prove that it's true.

This last comment is a reminder that openness does have real strategic benefits for the company that go beyond engineering and user empowerment. Google is increasingly under antitrust scrutiny by a more aggressive Department of Justice in the US, and it's already fending off antitrust investigations in Europe. DLF is one more part of the argument that Google is not a gatekeeper.

The DLF team does face occasional criticism that Google's products are "open" only to exporting material of less value to Google (see this comment from researcher Ben Edelman on getting data out of AdWords, for instance). But DLF has now worked with more than 25 teams at Google to make data export easier, and its efforts on products like Google Docs are certainly good news for users.

"We try to raise awareness within the company," said Fitzpatrick, though he admitted with a grin that he has no "authority" to make anyone do anything.

There's always more to do. The team does monitor a Google Moderator page where users can make suggestions—and there are plenty. "Gmail contacts—being able to export them and reimport an edited version, without duplicating every single one," says one idea. "Add hCalendar microformats to Google Calendar, so that events can be reused elsewhere," says another. "Let me get my Chat history from gMail," says a third.

Fitzpatrick promises that more is coming, though he can't talk about projects in the pipeline. What he can do, though, is mail you a sticker.