Chat and e-mail

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

Video chat is the big thing again, at least according to Facebook, which let loose a new video chat service yesterday. Powered by Skype, the new feature lets Facebook users start video calls with one another while continuing to use the site.

While other video chat tools may have been built on top of Facebook's application platform, this now comes out of the box for Facebook users, old and new. The result is that Facebook's added yet another way for its 750 million users to communicate with one another.

But moving beyond the hype, the big thing you'… Read more

If you left your Android phone at home in San Francisco, then hopped on a plane to New York, you could still receive texts and phone calls in the concrete jungle if you happen to have an app called MightyText downloaded on your phone and access to Google Chrome on your computer.

Maneesh Arora, a co-founder of MightyText, thinks it's silly that we can't get texts on our computer, so he created a company to solve that problem. MightyText pushes text messages and calls from Android phones to the computer screen. So far, Arora says, "we have … 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

Stability and bug fixes marked yesterday's debut of Thunderbird 5, which like its better-known relation Firefox has adopted a rapid-release cycle. Version-number hawks will notice that Thunderbird 5, available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux, has skipped version 4 entirely so it can keep pace with Firefox. The new Thunderbird also follows some of Firefox's feature leads by incorporating version 5 of the Mozilla Gecko engine, supporting dragging to reorder tabs, and adding the in-tab add-on manager that launched in Firefox 4 back in March.

By and large, the Thunderbird 5 release is more about keeping pace … Read more

Google is changing the inbox design for its wildly popular Gmail service, and letting users try the new look out, the company announced today. Unlike the ordinary themes that address color scheme, these new themes are part of a larger redesign that addresses elements like the size and shapes of the Compose button, search buttons, and navigation controls.

As of today, two new themes are available: "Preview" and "Preview (Dense)." These feature a large, red Compose button instead of a smaller gray one, and sharper edges throughout the design. The color scheme of these two preview themes remains predominantly red, white, and gray, but Google says more colors will follow.… Read more

Rumors about a new Gmail have been circling the Web, and the changes are definitely coming.

Google explains that Gmail will get a lift over the next few months, and is "part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that's more focused, elastic, and effortless". Users can also expect changes in Google Calendar, which will be rolled out over the next few days.

It's unclear when the new Gmail interface will take over, but until then, you can start using it with this trick: