Microsoft: Windows 8 will not be your idea

Perhaps some of you are still bathing in the pride you felt when Microsoft accepted your ideas for Windows 7. Several of you seem, indeed, to have appeared in the company's advertising (played, perhaps, by slightly more photogenic humans).
However, I may have some bad news for you with respect to Windows 8. It seems as if the company might not care so much about receiving your ideas this time.
At least that is the impression gained by former IT Manager Chris Carlucci from Hopedale, Mass. when he approached Microsoft with an idea for Windows 8. I won't give too much away about his suggestion, save to say he thought that one small part of the operating system might be made easier for the average human being to operate.
The e-mail he received in reply from a Microsoft Customer Service Representative called Alex might make some question the nature of, um, communication as we know it.

For Alex began in a hopeful tone: "I understand you would like to submit suggestion for the next generation of Windows. I will be glad to assist you with the information."
However, things went a little awry in the very next paragraph: "Chris, I would like to inform you that, while Microsoft does accept suggestions for existing products and services, we do not accept suggestions for new products, technologies, processes."
Wait on there a moment. But what about Windows 7? What about all those customers who said that Windows 7 was their idea?
Alex continued as if Windows 7 had never happened: "We hope that you will understand our intention to avoid any potential misunderstandings or disputes that may arise from submissions of information not related to current Microsoft products. Thus, we are returning your information without review."
Carlucci was confused. So he sent me the correspondence. Still blinking, I contacted Microsoft. While the company does insist that Windows 7 was, indeed, created with the helpful suggestions of customers, I was unable to get a statement from anyone at Microsoft regarding this specific correspondence. Should I get one, I will happily update.
Many will feel this is just a case of a customer service representative who might not have chosen the best course of action in representing his company's customer service.
But Alex's e-mail did manage, perhaps, to put a final little needle into Carlucci's altruistic bent with the words: "Microsoft does value your feedback. We would like to encourage you to continue to send us suggestions on the products and services that you use today."
Carlucci's reaction: "Talk about making me speechless."

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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' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+, Google's brand-new social network site.

Facebook's actions to block the extension apparently were effective. Many users of the Facebook Friend Exporter tool reported that it didn't work, producing only names and the address of their Facebook pages, but not the e-mail address. In addition, Facebook earlier had begun showing addresses as graphics, not text that was easily detected, processed, and copied; Mansour got around this obstacle by extracting the information through the mobile version of Facebook's site.
In a comment on his Google+ page, Mansour had this to say:

This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.
No worries, a new version is on the making ... I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don't own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.
Seriously ... more motivation to figure out a different approach.

It's become a cat-and-mouse game. Mansour is working to sidestep Facebook's obstacles.
"New version with a different design is currently deploying," Mansour said. "You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me."
Mansour said that for now, he reverted his tool back to an earlier method involving iFrames.
Facebook didn't respond to request for comment yesterday and didn't immediately respond today.
The tool, though, doesn't look like a good fit with Section 3.2 of Facebook's terms of service, which state, "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."
End runs around Facebook
Mansour isn't the only one working on a way to let people extract this data.
Rafael Laguna, chief executive of e-mail and collaboration software maker Open-Xchange, said in a Google+ post today that his company is working on a similar tool.
"If it works we will release it on our test server immediately," Laguna said. The work is part of the company's SocialOX project that, among other things, is designed to give people centralized control over personal information stored at sites such as Facebook, Xing, and LinkedIn.
Laguna acknowledges that it might be difficult, but believes the fact that the software is installed in many places will hamper blocking efforts.

"Using the FB API's don't get you the email address of your Friends, just name and picture which doesn't really get you far. So we have to "scrape" the email address from the profile page of the mobile app, like Mohamed does. Facebook may block the server but everybody can download their own Open-Xchange server and install it someplace else, this will be hard to impossible to block.
In theory they can [block data availability by detecting behavior indicating an effort to copy it]. If you extend the cat-and-mouse hunt to hundreds of machines on hundreds of different lines it is very hard to track due to timing differences. Of course browsing through all friends is an unusual behavior, so you can block after a certain number of profile page views of one user. Or they can simply hide the email address behind a Captcha [the text-recognition tests used to screen out computers].

Facebook's stance has triggered something of a backlash among those who don't like to see data that's been shared to them be locked up.

The open-source Diaspora project is billed as "the social network that puts you in control of your information."

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

A Quit Facebook Day drew a commitment, at least an ostensible one, from tens of thousands of people to dump their accounts.
And an open-source project called Diaspora has been working on social-networking software that runs on a distributed network of servers that could perhaps eventually become part of the federated social Web.. (A Diaspora feature, aspects, sounds awfully similar to Google+ circles: "personal lists that let you group people according to the roles they play in your life [and] a simple, straightforward, lightweight way to make it really clear who is receiving your posts and who you are receiving posts from.") Diaspora is in alpha testing now, with the first invitations sent last November.
Such initiatives, though, have shown no signs of denting Facebook's dominance.
Google is another matter. It's already got millions of Gmail users and several other online services people sign up for--Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, for example. It's got a strong brand name and lots of spare money to fund its ambitions. It's got a mature advertising technology to make money from it. And it's got plenty of experienced programmers and a massive global network of data centers to operate at large scale.
What Google doesn't have is people using its services the way they use Facebook--a digital version of the minutae of life's interactions woven into hundreds of millions of people's daily lives. The hassle of rebuilding a person's social connections at Google+ is a major barrier to Google achieving that success.
No wonder Facebook is leery of letting this data out of its hands.

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iPhone 5 and iPad 3 arriving in October

Could we have both a new iPhone and iPad this year? A new report says suppliers are gearing up to help Apple produce millions of both for an October release.
Citing component industry sources, DigiTimes says a number of Taiwan-based companies that supply Apple with parts for its gadgets have "begun to prepare materials" for the two iOS devices, with production slated to start in September.
The 50ppi difference could go against Apple CEO Steve Jobs' original claims when introducing the iPhone 4 at WWDC last year; then, he put the "magic number" at about 300ppi. Even so, it's nearly double the pixel density count of the existing iPad model, which could benefit text and photo clarity.
That Apple's working on a follow-up to the iPad 2 is not much of a surprise. A similar report from DigiTimes earlier this month said Apple was in the process of selecting the parts that would go into it. However, Apple introducing a third iPad model within eight months of debuting the last version would be highly unusual. Even the iPod, which has been one of Apple's most frequently updated gadgets, has long stayed on an annual cycle that may only vary by a few weeks to a month.

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