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 that would extract not just e-mail addresses, but birthdays, phone numbers, and more. It was designed to import that information directly into Gmail, from which it could easily be used to help reconstitute people's Facebook connections on the new Google+ social network.
Facebook doesn't want people exporting friends' contact information--though it's happy to import the same data from Google. Google argues for a more open policy, letting you export address-book information from Google+, but it's been on the other side of the fence too: it blocked export of e-mail addresses from an earlier social network attempt, Orkut.
The Open-Xchange's tool uses a demo account to use a feature called Social OX on the company's server software that matches contact information with e-mail you've sent already. It's available online right now, but the company is building it into the next version of the software that people can download and run themselves, too.
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