addresses

Street View cars grabbed locations of phones, PCs

scoop Google's Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.

The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago.

The French data protection authority, known as the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) recently contacted CNET … Read more

Upload contacts to Google+ via your address book

New to Google+ and looking for more contacts? A feature launched yesterday lets you hunt for potential prospects by uploading your address book from Microsoft Outlook and other desktop e-mail clients.

As described in a Google+ post by Google technical staff member Paul Lindner, the feature works with several e-mail and address book programs beyond Outlook, including Outlook Express, Mozilla's Thunderbird, and Apple's Address Book. But it apparently also supports any e-mail address book or contact list that can be exported to a VCard/VCF or CSV (comma separated values) format.

I tested the feature using Microsoft Outlook … Read more

Carryout contacts

A good contacts manager is a necessity, whether it takes the form of a little black book or a computer program. SSuite Office - Address Book Pro Portable is a basic program that can keep track of addresses, phone numbers, and other important information. It's definitely not the most full-featured program of this sort, but it gets high marks for portability and ease of use.

The program has a commonsense interface, with buttons for adding, editing, deleting, and printing contacts on the left side of the home screen. This screen also displays your contacts in a list with names … Read more

Mail master

Keeping a list of customer contact information is only part of what it takes to stay in touch; you also need tools to make it easy to produce and mail correspondence. TSC Free Address Book is much more than just a database of addresses. This program also lets users create form letters and labels, saving time when you're ready to contact your clients or any other group of people you need to correspond with en masse.

TSC Free Address Book's interface isn't particularly attractive, but it is easy enough to navigate. Users can create personal profiles for … Read more

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

Google doubling Google+ population

The Google+ team, facing strong demand for the new social-networking service, has expansion on its mind.

Google briefly let Google+ users invite new members last night in a plan to double the social network's population. And Google has begun detailing its plans for letting business users, not just individuals, use the service starting later this year.

Google has been limiting the individual sign-up rate, leading to frustration among many who want to get in. But Dave Besbris, the Google+ engineering director, said last night it was time for another growth spurt.

"Things are going well with the systems … Read more

Open-Xchange plans Facebook contact exporter

Open-Xchange, maker of open-source software for e-mail and other collaboration needs, plans to release a tool to let people extract contact information from Facebook friends who've shared it.

The technique uses the company's SocialOX tool, which provides what Chief Executive Rafael Laguna calls a "magic address book" that draws on your online address books at LinkedIn, Gmail, and other sites.

The tool is arriving during a hot time for social networking: Google has just launched a mostly closed beta test of its new service, Google+, and incumbent power Facebook is blocking access to another tool that can be used to move contact information to Google+. … Read more

Tackling slow address autocomplete in Mail

When you begin entering recipient's e-mail addresses in the "To" field for new messages in Apple's Mail client, the program will attempt to autocomplete them to make addressing your messages easier. This usually is a pretty quick process; however, there are some instances where slowdowns can occur. When this happens you might enter a few characters of a contact's name or e-mail address, and Mail will then show the spinning color wheel and not respond, which may occur for a number of minutes.

If this happens you can likely fix the problem by checking either … Read more

Facebook blocks contact-exporting tool

Facebook has been blocking a tool intended to let people extract contact information their friends have shared with them, the tool's developer said today--but he's working on a way to evade Facebook's restrictions.

"Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove e-mails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people," warned Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension that automates the data extraction process.

The tool lets people save their contacts' … Read more