If you’ve used Google Reader for a long time, like I have, this is huge news.
Google adds ability to download Latitude and Google Reader data from Takeout data porting center
A year ago, Google revamped Reader’s UI and removed the sharing features in favor of G+ sharing. I’d been using Reader shares for several years, both to share and consume content, as well as to bookmark interesting content for later retrieval.
Shares were still available on a public page, and there were several hacks out there that people built to extract their Reader content into useful archives. Reader also provided an export to JSON, but that never pulled my complete history of shares, hitting a hard limit that I couldn’t seem to hack.
Every few months, I’d comb the web for solutions, but nothing worked. So, I’m very happy to report that I’ve successfully used Google Takeout to reclaim a nicely-formatted JSON file of all my Reader shares, as well as all my Starred items, subscriptions and all the old social data that was removed. I think Google promised this at some point, and I’m glad they kept their word.
Now, I can make a nice local webpage of links, or maybe I’ll trust another service like Pocket to keep all my links safe.
Find the comments.
Wow this is really cool, I’m almost as excited to learn that Google has a “Data Liberation Front”
They do indeed. When that initiative launched, I remember thinking it would amount to nothing, but apparently, they were serious.