Week in Review: Government opens up data, Facebook launches messages

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Show us the money

The Government announced this week it would be revealing more about what each department was spending tax payer’s cash on.

In an announcement made today, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude confirmed any spending over £25,000 would be unveiled on the data.gov.uk website.

Prime Minister David Cameron also said Government contracts over £25,000 would be released online from January, enabling more small and medium business to get in on the act.

Facebook’s ‘Gmail killer’

The rumours had been circling for a while but finally Facebook has announced its new messaging service, unimaginatively named Messages.

The new service offers “@facebook.com” email addresses, along with priority inboxes and link ups with existing profiles.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of the leading social network, announced the new service at the Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco this week and confirmed it would be rolling out to users over the next few months.

Best of the rest

The debate on net neutrality has kicked of again this week as communications minister, Ed Vaizey, gave his backing to a two-tier system allowing ISPs to charge content providers for quicker access to their sites.

More malware was produced each day in the third quarter of 2010 that ever before, according to a McAfee report, with a staggering 60,000 new pieces hitting the web daily.

Cloud computing early adopters were rewarded this week, with a new report from Fujitsu showing they were saving, on average, a quarter of their costs for each cloud-based project.

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