open data

Facebook blocks a second contact export tool

Open-Xchange's tool for helping people reconstruct their Facebook contact list on Google+ has fallen victim to Facebook's revocation of its privileges.

Open-Xchange, a maker of open-source e-mail and collaboration software, last week launched a tool that used the company's Social OX technology to help people assemble a list of their friends. It used connections to a combination of services such as LinkedIn and e-mail accounts to create a single "magic address book."

The tool didn't actually copy e-mail addresses from Facebook--only first and last names. It then matched those names to other e-mail records in the user's accounts. But Facebook disabled the API (application programming interface) key that the software used to read the names, Open-Xchange Chief Executive Rafael Laguna said.

Facebook gave two reasons for the move and underscored the seriousness of its decision with a warning about the repercussions: … Read more

Open-Xchange launches Facebook contact exporter

Open-Xchange, a company making open-source software for e-mail and other collaboration tasks, released a tool today to help people migrate extract contact information their Facebook friends have shared.

"The cloud needs to be open--just as source code and data protocols needed to be open to create the Internet. With more and more data moving into and being created inside the cloud, this data needs to be owned by the creators, not the services," Open-Xchange Chief Executive Rafael Laguna said in a blog post explaining Open-Xchange's tool.

His perspective differs from Facebook's: the company has blocked a Chrome extension … Read more

IT's new sheriff: The Open Data Center Alliance

This week, the Open Data Center Alliance announced itself. Yet another industry association? I hear you yawning already. Don't nod off, though. Within two years, the ODCA is likely to be the most important, powerful, and useful industry association in information technology. How is that possible?

The association is creating a culture of sharing between global IT leaders, allowing them to learn from each other and cooperatively influence tens to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of annual IT procurements. That is a wow-worthy new world order.

It's true that IT is already chock-a-block with industry associations. We … Read more

If the desktop is dying, mobile sync is king

Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.

That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open Web.

Traditionally, sync has been that thing you do between your desktop and your one mobile device to ensure that calendars, address books, and even browser bookmarks are current between the two islands of computing. But in … Read more

Facebook is the new Compuserve

Want to know what prominent Apache Software Foundation and former Google developer Greg Stein thinks about MySQL, the GPL, and the European Commission's antitrust stance on Oracle/Sun? You've got two options.

You can read his original post here, of course. But if you want better commentary, you'll need to read this same post on Facebook.

Except that you probably can't, unless you're Stein's "friend" on Facebook.

Open Web, meet your closed cousin, Facebook.

People rightly fret about Facebook's twisting, turning approach to privacy, but perhaps a far greater concern is … Read more

Opening up in self-interest of Google, Microsoft

Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?

With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:

Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation. Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site. Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, … Read more

EC takes three steps back on software liability

The European Commission has a bold plan for improving software quality: make software developers liable for their code. The purported reason? Consumer peace of mind, according to the European Union commissioner of consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva:

If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed. That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. [The] internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can … Read more

Do we all work for Google now?

Thursday I blogged that I'd like to see Google (or someone...Apple, Mozilla, someone else?) aggregate social Web applications so that I don't have to trip all over the Web checking what so-and-so is doing on Facebook, then sprinting back to LinkedIn to help someone else on a job search.

Judging from the comments, quite a few people disagree, to a great extent due to mistrust of Google with their data. I can appreciate that, though Google has expressed a desire to open up social-networking applications with open-data policies.

Regardless of promises, many mistrust Google because it's … Read more

Ubuntu's next wave: Open server, closed cloud

I admit that I nearly got caught up in my former colleague James Urquhart's excellent analysis of Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 release, code-named Karmic Koala. I saw the word "open" laced heavily through the post, and given Canonical's commitment to fully open-source Ubuntu experience, I played along.

But something doesn't quite fit in Canonical's story.

It's called Amazon.com. Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 will give users an option to build its own Elastic Compute Cloud-style service, using open-source Eucalyptus (or another cloud provider), but the intent certainly seems to seamlessly plug users … Read more