Google Takeout itself was announced in June as an extension of the Data Liberation Front, which dubbed the service its “first revolutionary product”.

“This means that all of the data associated with your Google Voice account, from your call history to voicemail messages, greetings and call recordings, is now available for download,” explains Google software engineer Anthony Jawad. “Voicemail messages and greetings are exported as mp3s, text messages as microformatted html, and forwarding phone numbers as a card.”

Other services that allow you to retrieve data using Google Takeout include: Google Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, +1s, Stream and your Google Profile.

At DataLiberation.org, users can already browse through Google’s list of products and see detailed instructions for each one about how to “escape” from any of them. This list includes: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Businesses, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Bookmarks, Contacts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa, Reader, Voice, Web History, and YouTube.

“Since we began in 2007, the Data Liberation Front has been focused on one thing: making it easier for you to take your data in and out of Google,” the team says. “Our first step was to make it easier to get your data out of our products, one product at a time. While we’ve made great progress on this front, we’ve been on the lookout for even better ways to let you take your data out of Google.”

Right now, you can only use Google Takeout to take data out of Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, Profile, and Stream, but Google says more products will be added as time goes on.

Google also directs users to the settings menu in Google+. Of course, you have to have an invite to even use that at this point.

Download All Your Facebook Info in One File

Facebook announced the launch of  a new feature that allows you to download all your Facebook data in one file. You can simply go to a page, click that you want to download your info, and Facebook will zip it and email it to you. This will apparently include all info, including wall posts, photos, videos, friend lists, events you’ve joined, etc. 

Facebook says it is "taking security very seriously" because it contains personal information. It looks at if you’re coming from a computer you usually use, uses personalized CAPTCHAs, etc. It won’t include data you’ve deleted in the past.

This feature will begin rolling out today. 

Applications You Use Dashboard

The new Applications You Use Dashboard looks at all the apps you use and shows the last time they accessed data that you allowed them to access.  It also lets you change the permissions or revoke them from there if you want. 

"As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it’s important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

Groups

Once upon a time, Facebook launched friend lists, and they can certainly be useful for organization, but only 5% of people use them, according to Mark Zuckerberg. "In reality, almost no one wants to make lists," he says.  Now, they’ve launched new Groups (they won’t delete the old Groups, but they’re changing from here on out). 

These Groups are designed to let you separate your different groups of friends in ways that make sense. Whether its your family around the dinner table, your team in the locker room, or your close friend at the bar, these groups each have their own histories and social norms, as the company puts it. These new groups bring that same kind of functionality to Facebook. 

After a long explanation by Zuckerberg and other Facebook team members, it’s still a bit unclear why people will jump on this more than they did friend lists, but I guess we’ll see. It certainly has more functionality, but the company seems to think this is going to change how people use Facebook in general.  I’m not saying it won’t, but it’s hard to say, if that few people even use lists. 

Groups include shared space, group chat, and email lists (which is interesting in itself, based on comments made by COO Sheryl Sandberg a while back). 

If you don’t want to be in someone’s group, you can leave. You’ll be notified when you are added. Everyone in the group is notified when a new member is added. 

Groups will be rolled out to users over the course of the day, and the company expects the feature to be rolled out to the entire user base "relatively quickly". 

Wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year, the company says. In addition to that, users will be offered ways to export their Waves. This falls in line with Google’s Data Liberation Front efforts, allowing users to take their data from Google services away for use in other places.

"Some of you may have seen a post on the official Google blog several weeks ago about some changes to the Wave project, and we wanted to let you know that since then we’ve been hard at work figuring out all the details of the next steps," says Google Wave’s Lars Rasmussen. "We’re looking at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products, open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers."

"Thank you for your outpouring of support and kind comments," says Rasmussen. "We’re grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us. We look forward to sharing more information with you in the coming weeks."

While Wave never really caught on among the mainstream, its hard to say if it wouldn’t have eventually. Google likely hopes it still will, just as an added feature to other Google products in the future (perhaps Gmail? Google Me?).

While there seemed to be a general lack of Wave enthusiasm between its launch and the announcement of its winding down, there have been a great many comments expressing sadness over its pending demise. There has even been a "Save Google Wave" site set up. More Google Wave discussion here.

1. Make sure your users can verify their website in website management suites (like Webmaster Tools).

2. Choose a unique directory or hostname for each user.

3. Set useful and descriptive page titles.

4. Allow the addition of tags to a page.

5. Allow your users to use third-party analytics packages

6. Help your users move around

7. Help search engines find the good content from your users.

When Google says, "help your users move around," they mean let your users access their data. This is a concept that Google has become very big on. As you may have read, Google has started a group called the Data Liberation Front to address data portability, and has created a site dedicated to instructing users on how to move their data to and from the company’s various products. Basically, Google is suggesting you follow suit.

When Google talks about helping search engines find your users’ content, they mean help the crawlers. "Help us find users’ content using XML Sitemaps," says Greg Grothaus, Staff Software Engineer on Google’s Search Quality Team. "Help us to steer clear of duplicate versions of the same content so we can find more of the good stuff your users are creating by creating only one URL for each piece of content when possible, and by specifying your canonical URLs when not."

These may not seem like issues that a lot of people would have to worry about, but you may be (or maybe not) surprised at how often start-ups come and go, which have sites that allow users to create content. Perhaps following these guidelines would cater to an increased chance for a successful platform. More information on the guidelines can be found here.

The Click Fraud Suit

Sports site Rootzoo filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in federal district court in San Jose, CA, according to a report from MediaPost. They are apparently seeking class action status. Rootzoo’s claim is that Facebook charged advertisers for more clicks than what actually happened. Specifically, there was one day where RootZoo claims to have only had 300 clicks, and that Facebook charged them for 804.

Facebook said in a statement, "We have developed a series of sophisticated systems to detect suspicious clicks and ensure advertisers are not charged for this activity. In addition, we analyze tremendous amounts of data to discern larger click patterns and, in rare cases where this research or other analysis reveals advertisers have been charged for invalid clicks, we have always, and will continue to, issue credits to impacted advertisers."

Rootzoo is not the only party to complain of such activity from Facebook. A variety of users have voiced such issues in various locations on the web.

The Data Portability Suit

The second legal battle Facebook is involved with is a little more complicated. This one is actually a countersuit from a site called Power.com, who Facebook sued in the past after it violated their terms of service. Jason Kincaid paints a more elaborate rendition of the big picture in this case, but here is a look at the actual legal document.

If Facebook’s terms of service were violated, its hard to imagine the company losing this battle, although, I have no legal background by any means. Either way, it will be interesting to see the outcome of both cases.

"This is the first iteration of the implementation," a Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews. "To start, new users can now register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts, and existing users can link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider to connect with friends and eliminate the need for multiple sign-ins."

Once a user links their account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook.

Back in February Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation Board. The company also hosted the OpenID User Experience Summit around that time. At the event, they had product managers, user experience designers, and social web experts from companies like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Plaxo, and SixApart.

A the summit, they shared lessons learned from developing the Facebook Connect authentication system. "We’re also concerned with account security," says Luke Shepard at the Facebook Developer Blog. "Again, we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site."

Facebook says that according to tests it has run, first-time users who register for Facebook using OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. The company says more OpenID providers will be integrated into the registration and account linking process.

Facebook Connect lets third-party sites get integrated with Facebook, allowing Facebook users to invite their friends, as well as publish activities they engage in on the third-party site to their Facebook news feed.

With Digg, this includes diggs, comments, and submissions. So for example, when I am logged into Digg using Facebook Connect, I am presented with the option to publish it to my news feed when I digg a story. It then appears on Facebook looking something like this:

As you can see, it even presents the option for others to digg the item from Facebook. Admittedly, I have not engaged with Facebook Connect from other sites a whole lot, but I can see this particular integration catching on big time. I think Digg will see a nice increase in new users as a result.

"This represents one of the largest and more complex Facebook integrations to date," says Digg Founder Kevin Rose. "Over the past months, we have been working with the Facebook team to establish key standards and best practices, paving the way for future Facebook Connect partners. The team worked through several platform, data portability and scalability issues. We’ve given particular care to what the end-to-end experience look likes like as you enter, merge, or exit one or both services. The preference pages allow you to easily manage everything in one place and you always control the information you share."

To use Facebook Connect with Digg, simply log in to Digg, and you will be presented with the option to log in using FB Connect. You’ll always know when the feature is active, because there is a small Facebook icon that appears next to you profile pic at the top of the screen.

It’s based on OAuth, but there’s a security problem with OAuth. In fact, Twitter and Yahoo have both disabled OAuth support temporarily. Biz Stone talks a little bit about it on the official Twitter Blog:

This week, we received word from the folks at OAuth that they were looking closely at a security issue within the protocol. We take security seriously and felt the responsible thing to do was temporarily disable OAuth while this matter was sorted out. Yahoo and others made similar decisions. The developers working on Twitter projects that are in our beta test group felt this disruption the hardest and their patience is extremely appreciated.

It’s important to us that we support the ecosystem and developers that have grown around Twitter. Communication is a big part of this support but so is moving quickly and responsibly when security is involved. As we move further away from beta testing, Twitter’s OAuth support will grow more dependable and many of us will be able to take advantage of applications that incorporate the protocol.

Other Twitter-related Apps like We Follow and TipJoy take advantage of OAuth, and developers are eagerly awaiting support to be continued. Twitter says they are in close contact with the consortium of engineers who define OAuth. They’re expecting the service to return as early as today.

Sign in with Twitter is based on OAuth and lets users sign in to third-party sites using their Twitter accounts, much like Facebook Connect does with your Facebook account. Presumably you can now Tweet a link to an article without leaving the article page if it’s on a site that has sign in with Twitter enabled.

"Unlike Facebook Connect, however, Sign In with Twitter doesn’t let webmasters pull as much social context into the third party site – in some ways because that social context is quite different on Twitter in the first place," says Justin Smith at InsideFacebook. "First, the social graph on Facebook (which employs a bidirectional “friend” model) is different than the social graph on Twitter (which employs a unidirectional “subscription” structure). Though connections do somewhat overlap, the nature of the relationships on each is often different."

Twitter provides this flowchart to illustrate how Sign in with Twitter works: