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Apparently Google is feeling more confident about expanding the population of its social network, because the "invite people to Google+" button has been visible for well over a day.

The button had been appearing fleetingly since the Google+ launch on June 28, so Google's decision to leave it up carries the message that the company is less concerned now about a big growth spurt. Of course, the company can still throttle the rate at which it delivers those invitations or the rate it signs up the new members when they open their invitations, but the relative ease … Read more

Ford Motor Co. has established a corporate presence on Google+, evidently securing a place in a test of how Google's social network site will extend beyond individuals.

The Ford Google+ site had 1,222 followers on Saturday morning and featured posts such as a photo caption contest, a question about what people would like to see out of Ford on Google+, and promotion of a live chat with Ford's director of marketing communications--with a Google+ video-chat hangout afterward.

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

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, 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

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

The biggest challenge to making Google+ a viable competitor to Facebook is that people must reproduce their social graph--their collection of connections--at the new service. But a Chrome extension makes that process a lot easier by automating the extraction of contact information that your Facebook contacts have shared.

The extension, from open-source programmer Mohamed Mansour, is called Facebook Friend Exporter. It's not a simple one-click process, but it's close.

The tool, though, likely won't sit well at the dominant social-networking site. Section 3.2 of Facebook's terms of service states, "You will not collect users' … Read more

SSuite Office WordGraph is a free word processor that offers most of the features most users need in a lightweight, fast-loading package, including a spell-checker, word counts, and the ability to track changes. It can create and edit PDFs without additional tools, export documents in a wide range of formats, insert mathematical text, and create presentations that can be viewed in any Web browser.

WordGraph is clearly a word processor, to judge by its interface, but it strikes a fine balance between simplicity and complexity, with essential tools but few distractions. For instance, we set the page width by dragging … Read more

It's almost like a "Wizard of Oz" moment for Texas Instruments, which is opening the door to color displays on its popular calculators.

Next month, the semiconductor and educational technology giant is launching the $165 TI-Nspire CX handheld, its thinnest and lightest graphing calculator ever. The specs completely blow away the TI-84 that I used in college.

Thankfully, TI has moved away from the monochromatic screen of yesteryear and boasts that the CX has a 3.2-inch 16-bit color LCD (320x240) with a respectable 125 DPI. TI also bumped up the memory in the CX series compared to previous TI-Nspire models with 100MB of onboard storage and 64MB of RAM. I can imagine hackers are already salivating to get Doom and Game Boy Color emulators running on this thing as soon as possible.

Of course, the real strength of a TI calculator is its ability to handle higher-level mathematic concepts. The TI-Nspire CX is designed for pre-algebra, algebra 1 and 2, trigonometry, geometry, pre-calculus, statistics, business and finance, biology, physics, chemistry, and calculus classes.

An alternate Computer Algebra System (CAS) model is also available and is approved for standardized testing, such as the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, ACT, AP, IB, and Praxis exams. I wonder if it can calculate how many commas were in my last two sentences. … Read more