Photobucket and Google Calendar Added To Facebook Data Portability Options

Facebook just added two additional places where its users can move their data from the social network. Big Social said in a blog post that Facebook users are going to be able to move their image event listings to Google Calendar and their images to Photobucket.

Also: Facebook is Testing a ‘Threads’ Feature on Some Popular Pages

Completely Rebuilt From The Ground Up

Hadi Michel, Facebook’s Product Manager, mentioned that the tool was ‘completely rebuilt’ so that it is ‘simpler and more intuitive’ to use. The aim of the respin is to give people more clarity and flexibility regarding what they can move to which platforms.

This small feature is more broadly related to the Google, Facebook, and Microsoft-backed Data Transfer Project. Facebook users are already able to send their photos to Google photos, Dropbox, Blogger, Google Documents and WordPress. 

More or less, this all is in effort to be in compliance with the ACCESS Act, which lets users transfer their data to any competing platform.

The project was conceptualized as an open-source standard. The reality is that it is going to take a massive shift in governance for the new standard to be successful. 

In the long term, we want there to be a consortium of industry leaders, consumer groups, government groups. But until we have a reasonable critical mass, it’s not an interesting conversation.

Greg Fair – Google Product Manager

I think that its a good move for these companies to work together in this way. The internet is pretty much the wild, wild west still. Sure, we have come a long way since the 1990s, but there is definitely a need for these types of systems.

By now, most platforms already offer some form of data-download tool. The problem is, there are no current standards for the data and those tools rarely are able to connect with other services. This change to a standardized system is going to make data portability easier for everyone involved.