DataPortability is an effort by a group of volunteers and Internet application vendors to promote the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another.
In January 2008, several major web industry players joined: Google, Facebook and Plaxo on 8 January 2008,[1] followed by Drupal, Netvibes and Mystrands,[2] and then LinkedIn, Flickr, Six Apart and Twitter,[3] as well as Digg[4] and Microsoft.[5]
There are numerous open standards, microformats, and protocols that currently enable various aspects of data portability. These include APML, FOAF, hCard, OAuth, OpenID, OPML, RDF, RSS, SIOC, the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), XRI, and XDI.