Yes Ireland does have a strong take out food culture. But this is not the reason why Google has decided to launch its own Takeout service.

A team of Google engineers, called the Data Liberation Front, are tasked to enable users to move easily their own data in and out of Google. So, they have just come up with their first service called Google Takeout. This is a data exporting service.

So what does it do and how does it work?

• You log in with your Gmail username and password.
• Simply export your data our of the following currently supported Google products:
  
  • Buzz,
  • Contacts and Circles,
  • Picasa Web Albums,
  • Profile and Stream,
  • Google promises support for more services and products later on.
• You can export all your data at once or per Google product
• It will show under the downloads tab

The data is easy to use. It comes in a very portable standard format (a zip file), so you can to import it to other services with a few clicks.

In my test with Picasa Web Albums, i found images i did not know about.

It is a good service to test for your online personal reputation and brand management or in a corporate environment, for online brand and reputation management

This is no coincidence the Google TakeOut service is being launched today at the same time than the Google+. Google wants to be playing game when it comes down to personal data privacy and respecting the law!