Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter partner for ambitious new data project

Today, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. In a blog post, Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”
The current version of the system supports data transfer for photos, mail, contacts, calendar and tasks, drawing from publicly available APIs fr