kugelfish

<- Part I: Takeout Part II: Content Transformation -> Once we the takeout archive has been successfully generated we can download and unarchive/extract it to our local disks. At that point we should find a new directory called Takeout with the Google+ posts being located at the following directory location:  Takeout/Google+ Stream/Posts . This posts directory contains 3 types of files: File containing data for each post in JSON format Media files of images or videos uploaded and attached to posts, for example in JPG format Metadata files for each media-file in CSV   forma with an additional extensions of .metadata.csv The filenames are generated as part of the takeout archive generation process with the following conventions: the post filenames are structured as a date in YYYYMMDD format followed by a snippet of of the post text or the word "Post" if there is not text. The media filenames seem to be close to the original names of the files when they we...

Part II: Understanding the takeout archive -> For the last 7 years, I have been using Google+ as my primary social sharing site - with automated link-sharing to Twitter. With Google+ going away, I am looking to migrate my public postings to a new site, where they can be presented in a similar way. As the target for the migration, I have chosen a local community-operated pod of the diaspora* network. Migrating social media-data is particularly challenging. They are by definition an amalgamation of data from different sources: links, re-sharing, likes comments etc. - all potentially created by different users of the original social sharing platform. Also contrary to other data-sets (e.g. contact-lists, calendars or spreadsheets), there are no established, standardized data formats for exchanging social networking site activity in a platform independent way. Without being an expert in copyright and data protection law, I am taking a very conservative approach to ownersh...