Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter have collaborated and announced Data Transfer Project (DTP) a program that will create an open-source service-to-service data portability platform which will help developers and users to transfer their sites from one platform to another. The four companies are hoping that other companies will adopt their new technology.
The DTP framework is more than data transfer it also helps developers to build tools that will extract data stored in social media profiles. DTP is planning to take advantage of existing APIs. A scientific paper was published by the four companies who worked collaboratively on the project. The DTP will take advantage of the existing APIs to authorize data access between the platforms. There are a lot of security features baked in and there is also a governance body hired to look over the development of the framework.
The code for the DTP framework is available on GitHub. At present, DTP supports some export types.
“Our prototype already supports data transfer for several product verticals including: photos, mail, contacts, calendar, and tasks. These are enabled by existing, publicly available APIs from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Remember the Milk, and Smugmug,” said Brian Willard, Software Engineer and Greg Fair, Product Manager at Google.
There are many internet users in the world with low bandwidth connections. Service to service is especially important if the infrastructure constraints make the importing and exporting impossible because of the low powered client machine. The Data Transfer Project will tackle issues like this and with these tech companies believing it would be great if more companies were to show an interest in this project.