One of the competitors to domain registrar GoDaddy is accusing the service of purposefully delaying domain name transfer requests. Namecheap, which stands to gain a lot of accounts from businesses and consumers switching away from GoDaddy, accuses GoDaddy of withholding WHOIS information to Namscheap, delaying the transfer process.
Update: GoDaddy has responded to Namecheap's accusations. See the statement below.
Three years ago, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority looked lost, and so did many of its riders.
Those who hadn't memorized Metro's schedules had to employ its persnickety Trip Planner, a clunky Web form that not only won't let you click on a map to specify your location but also chokes on cities, states, Zip codes and even commas if you add them to a street address. Meanwhile, other U.S. cities had enjoyed transit directions from sites like Google Maps since at least 2005. But not DC.
As we've mentioned before, Africa has made an asset of its liability. Its relative dearth of infrastructure has inspired a generation of tech thinkers to innovate its mobile technology. Yaw Anokwa is one such innovators. His project, Open Data Kit, "a free and open-source set of tools which helps organizations create mobile data collection solutions with smartphones and cloud infrastructure."
In an interview with Geekwire, Anokwa explained the kit is already being used to do socio-economic and health surveys. The survey data is tied to GPS locations and assigned images. Additional projects include creating "decision support" for medical professional sand "building multimedia-rich nature mapping tools.."
Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building a team that will develop software aimed directly at the future of the web.
Called The Locker Project, the open source service will capture what's called exhaust data from users' activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possesion and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data. Miller's three person company, Singly, will provide the corporate support that the open source project needs in order to remain viable. I'm very excited about this project; Miller's backgrounds, humble brilliance and vision for app-enabling my personal data history is very exciting to me.
Facebook announced this weekend that it would begin offering third-party applications and websites a way to request that users share their "current address and mobile phone number." Simple enough, right?
While Facebook says that the move is intended to make it easier for users to take their information with them across the Web, members of the data portability community argue that its yet another move by Facebook to lock users in. At the same time, the question of how Facebook handles these permission requests and whether or not it's clear to the end user is a point of contention that further calls into question how a user's online identity should be handled.
We asked some experts in the field and here's what they had to say.
A week ago, Google made changes to its Terms of Service that effectively blocked Facebook from importing a user's data from Google without offering reciprocity. Ever since, the two companies have duked it out in public, with public statements, comments on blog posts and even a warning that Facebook would "trap" your data.
We spoke with a few members of the data portability community to see what they had to say about the debate between these two big companies and what it means for the rest of us.
Facebook announced a number of features yesterday, not the least of which being the ability for its users to download their information - their wall posts, photos, status updates and other content all in one neat package.
While the move is a significant step in the right direction for the social network and its users, a few significant players in the data portability discussion are here to remind us that we aren't there quite yet.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is introducing a collection of community data sets today in an event at the National Academy of Sciences (webcast).
According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." At today's event a number organizations are demonstrating a preview of their work with the data, including Google, Microsoft and GE.
Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook's recent privacy changes were not nefarious, but rather an unselfish pursuit of "a concept called data portability."
As the one of the people who popularized that concept in relation to social networks, and as a founding member of the organization representing that cause, I'd like to call bullshit on that.
