Google Takeout was unveiled in summer 2011. It allows Google users to export all their Google data to disk or just data from individual services. It's all thanks to the Data Liberation Front team, which builds tools to give Google users control over their data.

"If you lock your users in, it makes you complacent," Google's Brian Fitzpatrick said at OSCON last summer. Contrast Google's per-product liberation with Facebook's feeble efforts at data portability. You can't even really delete a Facebook account; you can only suspend it. Google's Data Liberation Front makes user data portable back and forth between Google services and standard file types on the user's computer.

While Google Docs already had its own export option, its inclusion in Google Takeout is an important step. Takeout is the only place users have to go to get their information out of Google. Google's business is built around gathering data from its free services, but the Data Liberation Front lives up to its promise to give users final control. Especially for Docs, which has all kinds of applications for work and other sensitive uses, inclusion in Google Takeout is a great step for users.

Liberate your data at google.com/takeout.

Have you ever used Google Takeout to export your data?

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

I polled my Google+, Twitter and Facebook followers about which cloud services they use for file storage. Many of them mentioned Dropbox. Here's how I myself use Dropbox, probably a fairly typical use case:

I have a group of mainly business-focused folders on the hard drive of my desktop computer. Prior to Dropbox I would either send them to my laptop computer via FireWire (a high speed cord that connects one Mac computer to another) or by emailing important documents. This was both inefficient from a time perspective and also meant that my two computers quickly got out of sync.

Now, I simply connect those key folders on my desktop hard drive to Dropbox. This does two things: 1) it essentially backs up all of those files in Dropbox's cloud; 2) it enables my laptop to download all of those files from my desktop, using Dropbox as the middleman. I can also choose to download the files onto my iPhone and iPad, although because of limited storage I simply download individual files from Dropbox as I need to.

The beauty of Dropbox is that you're using the cloud as both a backup for your files and a conduit to sync files across devices. You don't have to rely on the cloud though, for example when you're offline. That's because the files are optionally downloaded onto the local machine, which I do on both my desktop and laptop (but not for my phone or iPad).

You get 2GB of storage for free on Dropbox, then premium plans start at $10 per month for 50GB.

Google Docs

I use a mix of desktop and online office software, although still with a bias towards desktop software for the heavy stuff (such as monthly statistics in an Excel spreadsheet for ReadWriteWeb). But it's possible these days to go completely Web-only for all office software. Google Docs is the most popular online office suite.

John Pozadzides, the CEO of web analytics software Woopra, told me on Google+ that "ALL new documents I create are done in Google Docs unless there is a specific requirement otherwise." He cited the collaboration features of Google Docs, noting that more than 80% of his documents are shared with others. But the key benefit to Google Docs is that John can access his documents "from anywhere there is a Web browser."

So while Dropbox is the best of breed among file sync and storage services, if you want to take it one step further you can attempt to cut out the middleman completely and create and consume files within Google Docs (or other online office solutions like Zoho and ThinkFree). It's not yet possible to completely eliminate local files. Colin Lovett told me on Google+ that he uses Google Docs and Photos "for everything except my raw audio and video files," for which he uses Dropbox to store.

Other Options

It's worth mentioning Evernote in this discussion, although it doesn't specifically market itself as a storage and sync service. It started out as an online notes tool, but now allows you to upload many different file types - images, audio, documents and more. I'm a daily Evernote user myself (I pay for the premium service), but so far I use it mostly as an online notes and planning tool.

Other options include SkyDrive (Microsoft's solution), CloudApp (a trendy Mac app favored by RWW hacker Tyler Gillies), Bitcasa (which is getting a lot of Valley hype for its "infinite storage"), SpiderOak, Box, Wuala and SugarSync.

If you're a developer or more technical than the average bear, check out our recent ReadWriteCloud post: From DevOps to NoOps: 10 Cloud Services You Should Be Using. Or you can build your own Cloud Drive!

Which Cloud Service(s) For Files Do You Use?

Whichever solution you go with, cloud storage of files is increasingly becoming a necessity for consumers. Even if you only have one personal computer, chances are you use other computing devices - at work, school or maybe even the good old Internet Cafe.

If you're new to this, I'd advise to give Dropbox a whirl. 2GB of storage is plenty to get started on. If you're an old hand already, let us know in the comments which tools and systems you use.

We're longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.

But the ability to work from anywhere without worry is a huge bonus for Google Docs. Any effort to use the Web to encourage more creative writing is all right by us, so we're glad to pass along our take on how Google Docs can help us all write a novel this month.

Write While You're On The Go

If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can write your novel from anywhere by visiting docs.google.com in your mobile browser. Here's how it works:

Android users also got a handsome update to their native Google Docs app, but iOS users can get their words in using the mobile site. Remember, every word counts, so even if it's just a sentence that pops into your head at the supermarket, it's vital to write it down.

Track Your Progress and Manage Versions

Google Docs lists a revision history of your document on the right-hand side. This will help you keep track of the work you've done each day, and if you end up regretting some huge rewrite, you can always step back.

But try not to do too much of that; the key to winning NaNoWriMo is to stop editing yourself and just keep moving the cursor to the right (or the left, if your language swings that way).

Make It Visual

No, pictures don't count towards your 50,000 words, but sometimes you've got to illustrate, and Google Docs makes it easy. It added some new features last month, like drag-and-drop images, that make visually sprucing up your novel a snap. Another new feature is format painter, which helps quickly change the style of highlighted text, useful for working on your story's formatting.

Just Write It.

Of course, the only way to write your novel is to do it, so don't spend too long tweaking your settings. Keep making the clackity noise on your keyboard, and you'll get to 50,000 this month. Don't worry. It's so worth it.

Learn more about National Novel Writing Month at NaNoWriMo.org, and sign up to start writing your novel! You can also follow @NaNoWriMo on Twitter and commiserate with all the other slogging writers using the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.

Are you writing a novel this month? Share your NaNoWriMo profile in the comments!

In addition to the collaboration features, Docs has added new transitions, animations and themes, with which PowerPoint users have been fluffing up their posts for years. The new features are only supported on modern browsers.

It's the latest Docs product to enable live collaboration in a rollout of updates that began over a year ago with basic co-editing. Google Plus has opened all kinds of new potential ways to collaborate. Hangouts, the group video chat feature on Plus, got live Docs integration in September.

The integration of all these Google services into one seamless collaboration platform is a ways away, but it's coming together. The Docs team keeps on adding features like Presentations that make Microsoft Office less and less interesting.

Read more on the Google Docs blog.

The Google Docs Android app launched in April, enabling mobile uses of the software such as optical character recognition (OCR) using the camera.

Today's update is a complete redesign of the Android app. Editing documents is not the most natural touchscreen activity, especially on a phone-sized device. Typing on a touchscreen keyboard is no picnic, but the native Google Docs app does have some advantages. It enables use of the camera to capture images or text and add them to projects on the go. Today's redesign complements those features with a more comfortable and compact touch interface.

Users on other platforms can edit docs from a basic mobile Web version, but a native Docs app is still currently an advantage of Android. One important feature is still missing, though; the app doesn't use local document storage, so editing requires a connection to the Web.

The app is available in 46 languages and can be downloaded now from the Android Market.

Do you use Google Docs on a mobile device? How is the experience?

Today's update brought Hangouts to mobile devices, and it added "On Air" mode to allow users to broadcast to the public (once On Air opens to everyone, that is). All these features sound like fun. But the killer app on Google Plus is more about work than play. Google Docs is now available live over Hangouts, making live, face-to-face collaboration possible on the Web for free.

With screensharing and a shared sketchpad, and especially with Docs, Google Plus is now a platform for making stuff together, face-to-face. It's the first Plus feature that's categorically different than anything Facebook can do. Facebook surely has a bunch of exciting things to announce this week, but there's no chance any of them will go in this direction. Google Docs is it as far as cloud-powered collaboration goes - outside of the pricey enterprise market - and that team is killing it lately with new features. Google Plus Hangouts are now a natural place for people to work remotely together. Can you believe that these capabilities are free? There aren't even ads on it yet!

Plus for the Enterprise?

So, does that mean enterprise collaboration suites like Citrix or WebEx are in danger? Probably not. For one thing, unfortunately, Plus access for Google Apps accounts is not among the first 100 features, so Google's actual enterprise customers are still locked out. Presumably, though, that access will come, and while it won't be free, the Google Apps suite is pretty darn affordable by enterprise standards. Are the Hangouts tools powerful enough? Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for the vast majority of work tasks. Can Google Plus change corporate culture? That's a good question, and it depends whether Google wants to take the product in that direction.

Best of all, though: Google also began to open the Hangouts API to developers today, so independent geniuses everywhere can start expanding the possibilities.

Would you use Google Plus Hangouts for work? Let us know in the comments.

Just yesterday, Google Docs launched a new sharing option for comment-only permissions, meaning users can offer their documents for comment without giving people the ability to edit them. Four new features in two days for a free application? Where you at, Microsoft Office?

• Visualize evacuation zones for New York City during Hurricane Irene
• Host data sets made public by the State of California
• Gather data from local flu shot clinics for Google Flu Vaccine Finder
• Map shelters and road status during the tsunami crisis in Japan

Fusion Tables were previously available as a standalone service, but now they're one of the Google Docs document types (although it's marked as "beta," but hey, it's Google).

The other two features, format painter and drag-and-drop images, are simple, fundamental improvements in the Google Docs user interface. They make it easier and more intuitive to use, and even more mind-blowing that we don't pay for this service.

In fact, Google Docs is getting so useful - while Microsoft Office continues to cost over $100 - that we might begin to wonder what sort of trick Google is playing on us. In the meantime, though, we might as well get some great, collaborative work done.

What do you use Google Docs for? Tell us in the comments.

In March, commenting in Google Docs got a major upgrade, turning it from a basic, chronological comment thread into a rich conversation system with in-line comments, @ replies, notifications and the ability to mark comments as 'resolved.'

This seems like a small change, but it's part of a larger effort by the Google Docs team to improve the collaborative uses of the browser-based document editor. A mishap following one such tweak brought down the service for a short time last week, but the response from Google Docs was swift, clear and apologetic. Docs has also turned on Google's clean new interface design, which was introduced when Google Plus launched and came to Gmail as an option shortly thereafter. Improvements to the Google Docs experience are coming in fast.

Lest we forget, Google Docs is free to use. Even expensive office tools like, well, Office, don't make Web-based collaboration this easy.

How do you use Google Docs in your workflows? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.

The Docs team pushed a change that was "designed to improve real time collaboration within the document list." That sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, it revealed a big old memory management bug that they couldn't detect until it was exposed to the full force of Google Docs users. Basically, the machines that check for updates didn't clear their memory properly, so they filled up and crashed, shifting the load onto other machines, causing them to crash, and away we go. The team caught the problem within half an hour. It's worth reading the blog post to see exactly how.

Downtime is the bugaboo, the monster under our bed at the dawn of the cloud era. No service is 100% reliable, but cloud services are becoming more and more vital to keep our businesses running and our sites up. A cloud service provider's handling of an outage is absolutely crucial to keeping its customers happy and earning their forgiveness. But since outages usually require detailed technical explanations, they are often left to engineers whose tone might not be as gentle or apologetic as can be. When Amazon's EBS hosting services went down in April, bringing some of the Web's most important sites with them, the explanation was long-winded and dense, and the fallout was not handled well. Warren's post today couldn't be more different.

How have cloud outages affected you? Tell us your stories in the comments.

Other actions that can be done include the ability to quickly transfer ownership of a particular user's documents to someone else. This would be useful when an employee is about to leave the company, or if you need to clone their workspace. The system can operate either just for the Google Docs admin, or can be enabled for particular end users to see what is going on with their own documents. You can select multiple documents to change with a single operation, such as terminating access for all private Gmail accounts for all documents. And individual users can quickly search across the domain for particular keywords or other document properties that are shared with outsiders, which is great for eDiscovery purposes.

There are several useful reports that can be run, including a change report that shows you what has changed over a particular date range with your documents, a historical summary of which documents are classified by the system (externally owned or exposed to the outside), and an audit log that shows you what adjustments to document permissions were done by the system. Reports can be scheduled to run on a regular basis, such as every Monday and Thursday.

The service is available for a week free trial and is free for domains for less than 10 users. Otherwise, it is $8-$19 per user per year. You can activate the service from Google's App Marketplace here. There were other Google VMworld-related announcements this week, including our story today on App Engine pricing changes.

To bolster the update, Google Docs has also posted a new help page documenting spreadsheet formulas, making it easier to look things up. For now, the new features are only in English, but the blog post says "additional languages" are on the way.

Earlier this year, Google Docs added pivot tables, a serious data analysis feature, although Excel pivot tables can't be imported yet. It has also added several Web features that make public doc sharing and collaboration more powerful, such as document statistics and threaded conversations for collaborators. Another recent round of interface improvements made it easier to upload files and convert them to Google Docs automatically. Google Docs is becoming a powerful piece of software in its own right, and its cloud availability and collaboration features are pushing forward the very idea of a "word processor."

Google added the ability to edit your Google Docs on your mobile devices last fall, a huge boon for those of us who tend to work on the go and who need to be able to access, edit, and share our work via our phones. But the mobile Web interface has still felt a little clunky, and a good reminder that really smartphones aren't designed for word processing.

The new Google Docs app, now available for Android, makes the process a lot less painful (well, minus the fact that you're still working on with a small screen and keyboard, of course). While composition of new documents or spreadsheets may still be challenging, the app makes it very easy for you to share items with others and open files that you receive via Gmail.

Note that there's still no support for offline editing. And when you first load the app, it will take a while to sync your accounts. But once it does so, you'll find you have access to all the files you store there. The app is available now via the Android Market.

The first new feature will help those who tend to upload a lot of documents: Google has added the ability to upload folders, not just individual files. This upload will actually preserve the folder structure, which means that folders within folders will also be uploaded.

And finally, you'll be able to drag and drop directly into the documents list in order to start an upload. This will only work for individual files, not for full folders.

A couple things to note: many of these new features work on what Google calls "modern browsers" - Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Also, you might find that as you upload more and more files to Google Docs that you run into storage limits. You can either delete files or pay for additional storage ($0.02 per GB per month).

Google says these new features will be available to users in the next month.

Google continues to expand the storage and file-handling capabilities of Google Docs as it marches on toward offering a Web-only operating system with Chrome OS. Late last month, the company overhauled the service, creating new ways to organize and interact with files.

Today, it has announced that Google Docs can now handle 12 new file formats, giving users a dozen fewer reasons to use separate desktop apps.

The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn't clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files.

Today we're excited to launch support for 12 new file types:

• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

According to Sabharwal, these 12 file types "round out support for the major Microsoft Office file types," but also most other popular file types.

Now, will Google Docs work for everything for everyone? Not yet. But Google continues to add file storage capabilities, organizational tools and now additional file types. It's been months since I, personally, re-installed the operating system on my computer and I haven't installed a separate word operating system since. This would have been unheard of just a couple of years ago. Now, however, Google Docs can almost entirely replaced desktop programs like Microsoft Word or Open Office. I view attached files in email in my browser and edit files either in a simple text editor and store it in Google Docs or use Google Docs entirely.

Why is this important? Because in any Web-only operating system such as Chrome OS, we will hold on to certain paradigms, and one is that we need a central location to store and edit documents. If Chrome OS can't play nicely with the rest of the world, it will never get along. If we can, however, continue to function and interact with others, then the move will possible, at the very least. Adding all of the traditional Microsoft file formats is yet another big step in that direction.

Last year, Google began allowing users to upload docs of any file format up to 250 MB in size to Google Docs, turning the service from simply an online word processor into a cloud storage service. Today, the company has unveiled a number of user interface changes for Google Docs that continues the move toward becoming the mythical "Gdrive" - a cloud-based file storage service.

Over the past year, many of you have been taking advantage of the ability to upload any file to Google Docs. With more files and of a variety of file types in one place, it becomes more difficult to organize and find what you need quickly. As a result, we are happy to announce that, over the next couple of days, we'll be rolling out a refresh to the documents list, aimed to make it more useful to find, explore and share all your files stored 100% on the web.

To that end, the new Google Docs includes a view for all of your image and video documents, including an inline preview mode and video player, which the company just announced earlier this month.

In addition to advanced sorting, the redesign includes a bit of "Gmailification," with the abandonment of folders for "collections," which act similarly to Gmail's labels, and a "priority" sorting much like Gmail's Priority Inbox.

"Collections are designed to combine the best features of labels and folders," writes Bangaru. "A file can live in multiple collections, just like with Gmail labels. Collections can also be stored hierarchically, just like folders on your desktop. And of course, collections can be shared, just like you can share docs."

To get a full run down on the new features, take Google's guided tour.