Hasta La Gadget!

Google Takeout now offers more support for those of you with a Blogger account and/or a Google+ page. Now through the Google Takeout service, you can export information contained inside of your Blogger account as well as information in your Google+ Stream or Google+ Circles. The Takeout feature is provided by The Data Liberation Front, a Google engineering team in charge of making it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.

For those of you who don’t know, the Google Takeout service is an impressive service that lets you export data contained in your Google accounts. You can export data from Google+,Google+ pages, Blogger, Buzz, Contacts, Drive, Latitude, Pages, Picasa, Reader, Voice, and YouTube.

Google Takeout previously offered its services for your personal Google+ account, but now if you have a Google+ page set-up for your business, or websites, you can export the data from those as well. The new Blogger support allows you to export data from your entire Blogger account, or you can choose to export only a single page or blog. The data will be exported as an Atom XML file. Your Google+ pages will be exported as HTML files containing your posts and JSON files containing the circles on your page.

The Google Takeout service is like taking a trip down memory lane. Viewing files and data from the entirety of your Google accounts is very nostalgic. Looking back to your very first posts can be mind-blowing, seeing how far you’ve come and how far you’ve changed over time. I’d highly recommend you try it out.

[via Data Liberation]

Google Takeout now offers more support for Blogger and Google+ is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Tomorrow President Obama will be delivering the nation’s 200th State of the Union, and will be addressing the country during a joint session of Congress in the nation’s capital. However, the President will also be hosting a Google+ “Fireside Hangout” two days later on Thursday, February 14 at 4:50 pm ET to answer your questions.

This will be President Obama’s fourth time conducting a Google+ Hangout in which he answers viewers’ questions, so this certainly isn’t anything new for him. Plus, Vice President Biden and Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz have held their own Google+ Hangouts as well over the past few weeks to discuss various issues.

You can submit questions for President Obama’s Hangout session by heading to the White House’s YouTube channel and submitting a video or text question. Then, you can vote on questions you’d like to hear Obama answer during the Fireside Hangout. All questions must be submitted by 11:59 pm ET on Wednesday, February 13.

President Obama’s State of the Union will take place tomorrow night at 9 pm ET on all major television networks, as well as a YouTube live stream on the White House’s YouTube channel, where you can follow along with various charts and other information that will show up in a new interactive sidebar during the speech.

Image via Flickr

President Obama to host “Fireside Hangout” after State of the Union is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The team behind the Google+ video chat environment “Hangouts” has updated the system this week to work with internet connection speeds of all varieties. To attach to those that normally wouldn’t be able to keep up with a video chat interface (be it Hangouts, Skype, or otherwise), the Google developers working with Hangouts have revealed two new features: a Bandwidth Slider and “Audio-Only mode.” This means Google+ is ready to do not just video chat, but phone calls as well – almost as if Google Voice has come to visit!

With Google+ invading on not just Skype’s territory here, but Facebook Messanger’s as well, it’s not surprising to see updates coming in faster and faster each month. Back when Google+ was first introduced, Hangouts were all but a whisper on the radars of their future competitors. Now it would appear that Google+, a social network of some note, is sending the message loud and clear: “we want everyone!”

This update comes from Google developer Tim Blasi who writes specifically to those of you out there working with “low and/or unreliable connectivity.” With the Bandwidth Slider you’ll be able to literally push the quality of your video feed up or down for quality based on how powerful your web connection will allow. This will also be nice for those of you that want to video chat but don’t need the top quality you’re allowed.

With Audio-Only Mode you’ve got a one-button tap to take you out of the video game entirely. This button has you continue to speak in a group Hangout as you normally would, but with your profile image replacing what would normally be your video feed. Sound like a winning combination to you?

We’ve also this week seen an update for Skype for iOS that included automatic call recovery as well as instant messaging improvements. The war is getting hot right here and now! Have a peek at the timeline below to see what Google+ Hangouts has brought to the table over the past few months as well.

[via Google+]

Google+ Hangouts get “bandwidth slider” to battle Skype is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Due to the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, the topic of gun violence and gun control has reached an all-time high. Many lawmakers are blaming violent video games as the culprit, while others think that we just need stricter gun control policies. Vice President Joe Biden will be addressing these kinds of concerns tomorrow during a Google+ Hangout at 1:45 PM ET.

This isn’t the first time that the White House and Google have teamed up to bring Google+ Hangouts featuring powerful government officials, including the President himself. Around this time last year, President Obama conducted a Hangout and talked about several issues, including SOPA, which has gotten a lot of internet users riled up.

During Biden’s 30-minute Hangout, the vice president will be discussing the various White House policy recommendations on reducing gun violence. Biden will be joined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, YouTube celebrity Phil DeFranco, and Hari Sreenivasan from PBS NewsHour, who will be the Hangout’s moderator.

Google is calling these online chats “Fireside Hangouts,” named after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous radio addresses during his presidency. These Hangouts “bring top Administration officials to Google+ to discuss the most important issues in the country, face-to-face-to-face with fellow citizens.” Google has said that they will host more Google+ Hangouts in the future with other top government officials.

Image via Flickr

Vice President Biden to discuss gun violence in Google+ Hangout tomorrow is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Welcome to Friday evening everyone. The weekend will be underway soon, but before we jump in, let’s recap the news from the afternoon. We found out today that Google Maps on iOS might not be around for very long, so enjoy it while it lasts, while Motorola Atrix HD users are now getting a long-awaited update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Google is leaving Sync support in the dust starting on January 30, 2013, and there were launch events for the iPhone 5 in 33 different countries today.

Sharp has unveiled a ridiculously large and expensive 64-inch Ultra HD TV, but if you want one, you’re going to have to plop down an astounding $31,000. Google+ was given a massive update on Android today that includes things like full-sized image uploads and improved hangouts, and the next iPad mini is rumored to have Retina Display (surprise! Bet you didn’t see that one coming!). RIM showed off BlackBerry 10′s keyboard in a new video demo today, so if you’ve been waiting anxiously for the new OS to arrive, be sure to have a look at that.

We heard today that Wireless AMBER Alerts will be rolled into the Wireless Emergency Alert system at the end of the year, and Dropbox for iOS has been completely redesigned with a new update. AMC has announced that it will re-air the first two seasons of The Walking Dead in black and white, while Valve was busy rolling out a new Steam Game Guide beta today. NASA will be sending two lunar orbiters plummeting into a mountain on the moon in the name of science, and a new Android device called the Acer V360 was leaked running Jelly Bean on its 4.5-inch display. The UN’s telecommunications director said he was surprised that the US had backed out of a controversial new treaty, and Walmart is now offering iPhone 5s for $127 and the fourth-generation iPad for $399.

Finally tonight, we’re serving up some original posts for you to fill up on. Don Reisinger asks when Apple’s oft-rumored television will finally launch, while Chris Burns goes hands-on with the new free-to-play PC game Hawken and walks us through three phablets that are rumored to be coming from Huawei, Samsung, and Nokia in 2013. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, we hope you enjoy the weekend folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: December 14, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.