Google/Microsoft/Twitter/Facebook Announces Open Source Data Transfer Project

Google and the three technology giants Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook are working together to announce the launch of the open source data transfer project “Data Transfer Project (DTP)” on Friday, July 20th to promote universal data portability. The project aims to create an open source service-to-service data portability platform so that its website users and others can easily migrate data from one platform to another.

DTP provides an interface to a small set of standardised data formats that can be converted from any service’s proprietary API while using a standard such as OAuth for data transfer. Developers say the current prototype product already supports data transfer for multiple vertical products: photos, mail, contacts, calendars, and tasks. These are implemented through existing public APIs from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Remember the Milk, and Smugmug.

Those who want to learn more about the newly announced DTP project can read Google’s claims or go directly to  DataTransferProject.dev.

The source code for the DTP framework is available on GitHub.