Google Letting Apps Run On Their Cloud Google has announced a new service, Google App Engine, which lets web developers build their internet applications on top of Google’s technology. Developers will be able to use the Google File System and the Bigtable distributed data storage system in their applications, resulting in a strong backbone to compete with Amazon’s S3 service.
It’s free during the preview period, but the number of accepted applications and available resources are limited in the beginning. Let’s hope Google doesn’t leave it in a beta limbo for four years and make things impossible for some budding Web 2.0 companies.
Ex-Googler Bret Taylor has a very interesting article about opening up data sources so application developers can better take advantage of them, and so they can be free for innovation. Google could make App Engine a no-brainer for app developers if it has access to data source normal Web 2.0 companies normally go through hell to get access to.
Google Selling DoubleClick Performics Google has made a very popular decision, announcing it will be selling off the SEO business of Performics, a business of DoubleClick it received in the recently completed acquisition. Performics handled SEO and affiliate management for its clients, and a search engine doing SEO would have created a giant conflict of interest. The reaction has been almost nothing but positive, as many are glad to see Google eliminated this before it becomes a problem. However, Performics affiliate business will remain at Google, possibly creating a new area of the market for Google to dominate.
Googlers Leave For Facebook (and other places)
Some Googlers are jumping ship, heading for seemingly greener pastures (with stock options that aren’t already underwater), like Facebook. About 40 Facebookers, or 10% of Facebook’s entire workforce, used to be Googlers, showing that a definite shift is underway. Google’s director of social media, Ethan Beard left the company become Facebook’s new director of Business Development. Facebook’s new chief chef is Josef Desimone, formerly one of Google’s makers of free food, but Valleywag’s hearing that he won’t be missed.
A much bigger move than a chef changing jobs is that of Douglass Merrill, Google Chief Information Officer. He’s leaving for music giant EMI, becoming their new president. Now, leaving from a major exec position at a top Silicon Vallley company to become president of a big music company is almost certainly a step up, but given the music industry’s woes, you’d think Google could have had more to offer him than a top company in a failing industry could.
New Version of Google Talk in Testing
Google has finally remembered it has an IM client, releasing a Labs test of a new version of Google Talk. The first version of Google Talk was released over 2 and a half years ago, but Google has barely updated it at all in the meantime. The new version, dissapointingly, drops the calling feature, implying that Google has abandoned the original intent of the “Talk” name, but it does add tabbed browsing. I still use Talk every day, but I have no faith at this point in Google actually maintaining the software like it should.
Google Finance Adds Stock Screener
Google Finance now has something called a stock screener, essentially a type of sort/search site for the stock market, letting you narrow down through criteria to find stocks with specific attributes. For example, you can specify stocks within a range of market caps, dividend sizes, 52-week gains or losses, and others, and combine the criteria to discover the perfect stock. This being Google Finance, it’s all accomplished with fancy AJAX sliders.
I used it to discover that there is only one company on the market bigger than Google that also does not pay off a dividend: Berkshire Hathaway. Good company to be in, but Google hasn’t been as good at the market as Buffet in many months.
Ionut notes that Google is already running April Fools “jokes” around the world. In Japan, there’s something about a joke regarding words that are similarly pronounced. In China, the company blog says they’re launching a human-powered search engine (watch out, Mahalo). In Australia, they’re letting you search the future. And in the United States, they’re possibly firing hundreds of hard-working advertising people — wait, that’s not funny!
But seriously, on the one hand, I’m hoping Google’s April Fools joke is good, on the other I’d rather see all those DoubleClickers keep their job. The “other hand” is weighing a lot more on my conscience than the humor hand, but I suspect that among those writing the pink slips, Google “hilarious” joke will be the only thing they really care about tomorrow.
Google Earth Getting Street View? Webware reports that they’re hearing Google will add Street View, its popular novelty feature in Google Maps that lets you see street-level photographs of businesses, making it available in the Google Earth desktop software. Their source is very non-specific, but the rumor does sound very believable, since there’s no good reason for Google Earth users to lag behind Maps users for this long. Webware says the addition could come in the next few weeks.
Barack Obama Rendered in Google SketchUp
Someone used SketchUp, Google’s 3D modeling software, to create this model of Barack Obama’s head. The whole thing is 400 polygons of rendered facial features, and I gotta say, it creeps me out. At least Obama’s a decent looking guy; I can’t imagine how creepy a 3D rendering of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton (with giant eyes!) would look.
Sync Google Talk With Twitter Timothy Broder wrote a script that takes your latest Twitter message and makes it your Google Talk/Gmail Chat status message. It’s a simple thing, perfectly useful and good, just like a baby angel.
Crack Deal in Google Maps?
Is this really what this Digger thinks it is? Well, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to conduct a business transaction through your car window with a guy standing in the street. I think.
Does Google Chief’s $1 Salary Mean Anything?
For another year, Google’s head honchos will be taking a $1 salary, supposedly putting the interests of the business ahead of money. It’s a simple token gesture, offset by the fact that the guys taking the pledge, founders Page and Brin and CEO Schmidt, are billionaires, though it, in theory, would make them more focused on the health of the stock price. All three lost billions of dollars in the last few months as the once high flying stock tanked, though you won’t see them sweating it.
The salary/publicity stunt has been criticized as meaningless, and Valleywag has pointed out it means the super-rich taking the salary are contributing six cents to help Social Security and one penny for Medicare, meaning that none of their mega-riches are going to help those served by important government programs.
You can now add a Google Talk badge to your blog/website, letting your visitors chat with you at any time right in the website. As long as you are signed into your Google Talk account, even if visitors do not have an account of their own, they can just start chatting with you, with multiple conversations coming in tabs. Visit the Google Talk Chatback page to get the HTML and get started.
(via Amit)
Microsoft’s got something planned for release in this area in the next few days, too. They don’t seem happy with Google’s announcement, from what I’m hearing.
Gmail Chat, Google’s instant messaging application inside of Gmail, has added the ability to show your status as Invisible. This way, you can be signed in, see who’s online, and send instant messages, but no one can see you’re online (and interrupt you while you’re trying to get some work done.
As Ionut points out, since Google Talk has been abandoned and ignored, if you use it and Gmail Chat, you lose this feature, since it won’t work in GTalk. How much longer before Google Talk gets an update or an end-of-life announcement?
As always, Google search is the big boy, with Google Images the only other vertical that performs spectacularly. However, strong growth in Google Maps and Gmail mean that the two have a shot of breaking out of the pack and joining those two.
In the third tier are Google News and Google Video, one growing slightly, one sinking slightly. Guess moving around Video and changing its focus every few months hurt Video, though not as much as you’d expect. The fourth tier has Books, Earth and Groups, which enjoyed moderate growth, Scholar, which sank 32% due to neglect, and iGoogle, which exploded and grew over 250%. iGoogle is Google’s success story for the year, which is great news for the struggling personalized homepage product category and Google’s Gadget developer ecosystem.
There are the also-rans at the bottom, including Blog Search, the Google Directory (shockingly still popular than many of the others), Google Talk (most neglected product of the year), Calendar and Finance. Google Product Search is Google’s biggest failure, losing 73% of its users from when it was Froogle. A year ago, Froogle had a good ten million unique visitors and a nice brand name, now it has maybe two million and two generic names. Google killed Froogle, and hurt itself badly with this one.
Missing from this list is another Google success story, Google Reader. This suggests that Reader, while disrupting the RSS market, is too small to make the list, or that comScore screwed up (since we know Reader had a ton of growth). Also: No Google Apps or Google Docs, no Blogger or YouTube or SketchUp or Desktop.
It’s important to note that, of the 17 Google products listed, the only ones being monetized are Web Search (#1), Gmail (#3), Google Maps (#4) and Product Search (to a very small extent). Not making any money are Images (#2), News (#5), Video (#6), Earth (for the most part), Groups, Books, iGoogle, Scholar, and any of the others. Google would love to monetize Images, News and Video, but the amount of content it doesn’t own in there makes it damn near impossible to do so and not get sued.
Google Talk has added a number of bots that translate text for you, using Google’s Translation technology. To use them, just add the bot to your contact list. The bot names are all name@bot.talk.google.com, with the name being the two letter language code being translated from, the number 2, and the two letter code for the language being translated too. The bot names are, as compiled by Ionut:
bg2en (Bulgarian->English)
de2en, en2de (German< ->English)
de2fr, fr2de (German< ->French)
el2en, en2el (Greek< ->English)
es2en, en2es (Spanish< ->English)
fi2en (Finnish->English)
fr2en, en2fr (French< ->English)
hi2en (Hindi->English)
hr2en (Croatian->English)
it2en, en2it (Italian< ->English)
ja2en, en2ja (Japanese< ->English)
ko2en, en2ko (Korean< ->English)
nl2en, en2nl (Dutch< ->English)
ru2en, en2ru (Russian< ->English)
uk2en (Ukrainian->English)
ur2en (Urdu->English)
zh2en, en2zh (Chinese< ->English)
As he points out, the Bulgarian, Finnish, Hindi, Croatian, Ukranian and Urdu languages are not available in the normal Google Translate service, but Google Talk has them anyway.
If you’re got an unlimited data plan and the ability to use Google Talk on your mobile, this is the easiest way to get a pocket translator.
Google Reader has expanded its sharing features, now sharing your Shared Items with your Google Talk contacts. That means your friends will be able to see all the items you and any of their other friends are sharing from their RSS feeds, provifiding a great way for people to share cool stuff with other people they know. If you don’t want to share with a particular friend, you can set it so it won’t, and you can invite new friends to share with them.
(via Download Squad)
Earlier this year there was some guessing as to when Google would make something of the slice of AOL they purchased. Nathan had a tidbit of news and a realistic idea as to what Google might be working on. The idea was to marry AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, into the same chat interface found in Gmail. That way Gmail users could also chat with their AIM buddies without having to sign into AIM using their external chat client.
Well, nearly a year later, two years after a joint press release said something like this would happen, that idea has become a reailty. First thing this morning when I signed into Gmail and went to set my online status to unavailable, I found a familiar icon in my list of options. The AIM icon shows up near the bottom of the menu, allowing Gmail users to sign into AIM and access their buddy list in the same Chat area of Gmail.
Once you have selected “Sign into AIM”, a small new pop window appears. Simply sign in using your AIM username and password and your buddy list will be imported into your Chat list. When you are all finished or wish to sign out of AIM, click the drop down arrow to change your status and the text changes to “Sign out of AIM”.
If a user in your Chat list is online using AIM, you will see the AIM icon to the right, and if they are using an away message you will see their status color as orange and their away message will display below if applicable. This new addition to Gmail brings Google another step closer to simplifying, yet improving the online user experience. This is useful for the user who is not on their own computer, i.e., at the library, in a computer lab or a friend’s house. It would also not require users to have the AIM client installed on their computer.
Ryan Douglas manages Paid Search and Comparison Shopping Engines for PlumberSurplus.com, an online retailer of home improvement products including Bathtubs, Sump Pumps, and Bathroom Sinks.
Jotspot’s former VP of Product Development and current Googler Scott Johnston gave a presentation last week where he revealed much of Google’s plans for JotSpot. Turns out the collaboration software will be the basis for Google Sites, the replacement for Google Page Creator, using powerful collaborative tools to allow businesses to create “intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites”.
Scott also confirmed what most people had been suspecting, that Google Gears support will be built into Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar for offline access. He explained how offline and online collaborative editing of the same document would be reconciled.
What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
Google is also apparently not yet working on OCR (optical character recognition) for imported files (Microsoft Office’s OneNote does this), but may one day. Integrating GrandCentral into Google Apps is a major priority for Google, he said. And finally, don’t expect video conferencing in Google Talk/Chat, not soon at least, though it may be considered for the long term.
Two years ago next month, Google bought five percent of AOL for a billion dollars. Yeah, you might have forgotten that, but it was a really big deal at the time. While Google’s main motivation was to keep being the search technology for fifth-place AOL Search, there was a lot of talk on both sides about the two companies working together. The big get, mentioned right in the press release: Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger integration.
What the hell happened? It’s been two years, and the two products have made less effort to work together than the U.S. Congress. Granted, development on Google Talk has gone dark, with a second version of the product either not in development or massively delayed, and AOL’s rising star software division suffered massive multiple layoffs that have decimated their ability to ship good products and hold talented engineers, but interaction between the protocols could have been done quickly if someone had made it a priority.
As we do every once in a while, we’re hearing more leaks about supposed GTalk/AIM integration, this time in the form of leaked screenshots of a future Gmail build. If Gmail Chat gets AIM integration, that would be great news, but if it gets it and Google Talk doesn’t, it might be time to declare development of Talk a dead project. All the new Google Talk features seem to be happening in other projects, while the desktop client lies fallow.
I’m sure there are Google Talk users who’d love to be able to sign into multiple Google Accounts at once, manage personal and business contacts seperately. Well, turns out you’ve always been able to, just by applying a command line switch. It’s pretty easy, just:
Create a new shortcut to Google Talk
Right-click and go into its properties
Add “/nomutex” to the end of the Target entry
Now, you can open as many instances of Google Talk as you’d like, logging into different accounts with each one. Look at the screenshots above, you can see me chatting (and arguing) with myself.
Ionut Alex posted about a new feature added to the Google Talk Gadget for iGoogle, which can now handle multi-user chat. The chat client now lets you click a Group Chat button to invite more than just two people into a chat, something you cannot do in the regular PC software, or in the Gmail chat version. In fact, if you invite someone using any Gtalk-compatible client other than the iGoogle Gadget, it won’t work, and they’ll just be sent a link.
For the most part, the new feature doesn’t make sense. The Gadget is a supplement to the real client, so why does it have features the real one doesn’t? Most likely, and this is just speculation, there’s been development of a version 2.0 of Google Talk that will support this feature, but the client has suffered major delays, enough to the point that they just said “Screw it” and released the Gadget version. Don’t be surprised to see that new version of Google Talk sometime this summer.
That, or Google has abandoned the software version of Google Talk, which would be a damn shame, and is unlikely.
Interesting that Google and Yahoo (Google a lot more so) decided to make quasi-political statements about global warming, but I guess Earth Day is political in its own way. Google’s melting glaciers has to be the first time they’ve sent a message like that.
Google has bought the conferencing software developed by Marratech, giving it a powerful desktop-based collaboration tool with video, text, VoIP and whiteboard features. Google’s blog post indicates they will be using the software internally, for employee communications, but it is certainly reasonable that Google may eventually fold it into a more powerful version of Google Talk, or use technology in Gmail or the Google Apps suite.
Wouldn’t it be funny if Google just bought a copy of some software at Staples, and issued a blog post that read like they had bought the company? I mean, the Marratech press release/blog post almost read like they did exactly that. I can picture it now…
Collaborating with Microsoft
Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 8:10:00 PM
Posted by Douglas Merrill, VP Engineering
As a company, we thrive on fun interactions and spontaneous video gaming. So we’re excited about acquiring Microsoft’s video gaming console, the Xbox 360, which will enable from-the-couch gaming for Googlers in videogaming meetings wherever there’s a TV.
We look forward to learning from the extraordinary ingenuity of Microsoft’s engineers as they focus on video gaming research and development in Seattle, where they will continue to be located.
Update: To clarify some confusion, we bought an Xbox at Best Buy, not the company itself.
Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Finally, Google released today a version of Google Desktop for the Mac. Desktop, which is already being accused of duplicating Windows Vista features (and thus more useful on XP), also duplicates Mac OS X’s excellent desktop search. Presumably it will eventually also do what it does on Windows, that is duplicate the Mac’s widget feature. Still, Desktop is free and has many features (and is in many ways faster and more efficient) than the Mac’s built-in search, so it will no doubt appeal to many users.
Google has released a Gadget that allows you to run Google Talk on your personalized homepage, letting you run Talk within your browser without running it in Gmail. The Gadget in some ways has better functionality than even the desktop version of Google Talk, because it puts your instant messages in tabs, a useful feature in other IM programs that GTalk has yet to implement. It has other cool features, like showing YouTube and Google Video videos within the conversation window if a video URL is pasted, as well as photo slideshows from Picasa Web Albums.
Gmail’s storage space is now increasing at a faster rate. Previously, your inbox size increased by 0.33 megabytes a day, while now it gets almost 0.4 megabytes higher per day, or 145 megabytes a year. At current rates, Gmail will reach 3.56 gigabytes of space on April 1, 2012.
Viacom, who removed 100,000 videos from YouTube in a copyright purge and then sued Google for a billion dollars, is now being sued by YouTube users who had their legal videos improperly deleted during Viacom’s purge. Since the DMCA punishes those that use it improperly, Viacom could be in big trouble at the hands of the same law it is trying to slap Google with. Wonderful!
Google has released a blog version of its AJAX news ticker, showing blog headlines instead of news headlines. Nifty. (via)
What? I had more than one story about integrations and such, and that was easily the worst title I could think of. Who would have thought there was a way to include “stuff” in a title four times, and have it vaguely make sense?
Google Notebook is now integrating with Google Docs, letting you one-click export your entire notebook. Considering that Google is slowly acknowledging it is releasing too many products, and that Yahoo has received criticism for having multiple products with the same function, I could see Google closing Google Notebook eventually. Wouldn’t Notebook serve more of Google’s purposes as a plugin for Google Docs, then as a seperate product? Probably.
You can now send Twitter updates from Google Talk, by sending messages to twitter@twitter.com. Frankly, it doesn’t work, since it created a new Twitter account for me, instead of letting me post to my regular Twitter account. I’ll stick with posting through the Twitter Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget. Speaking of which, add me as a friend if you are on Twitter.
Valleywag wonders if Dodgeball is now completely over with Twitter gaining steam. Yeah, probably.
Here’s a real shame: Google hasn’t updated Google Trends since November. I liked Google Trends, even if it had many limitations, and I’d hate to see it so neglected. They neglected Google Images for awhile once, and it met with a lot of criticism. I don’t think Google Trends ever had that many loyal users, but it presented a useful peek into the thoughts of the Google-using public.
There are now two editions of Goofle Apps: the free Standard Edition and the paid Premier Edition. Both editions have Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and a customized start page, no limit to the number of accounts, mobile access, and administrator control panel and web-based support.
Premier Edition differs like so: For $50 per user per year, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee for email, 10 gigabyte inboxes for all email accounts (up from 2 gigs for the free version), the option of removing advertising from Gmail, shared calendars, APIs for integrating existing infrastructure (including single sign-on, user provisioning and management, and support for an email gateway), a limited release of email migration tools, 24/7 phone support, and third party applications and services.
A note: A 99.9% uptime guarantee means your account will be down for no more than 43.829 minutes per month. Google’s getting better, but outages have happened to Gmail, and I’m sure there will be months where Google has to refund a number of customers.
There is a free trial of Google Apps Premier through the end of April. Google Apps is free for schools and other educational institutions, as well as free for families and groups, which is really just another way of saying that those people can only sign up for the free version.
Here’s the control panel:
Interestingly, according to Nielsen/Netratings via Ionut Alex, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has pretty much cornered the entire market for web-based office applications, taking 92% market share. Looks like the market was pretty much just waiting for any big player to step in, and as soon as Google did, that was that.
For a 1,000-person organization, with a good licensing contract, that could come out to $250-$300 a user, or about five times the cost of Google’s solution. If you upgrade every other Microsoft Office release, that means $250 per user per six years, putting the total cost per year at $41-50, as much as nine dollars less than Google. For less money, you get to own your software, not rely on another company’s servers, get PowerPoint, get more powerful versions of every application, get an Exchange Server (which has many powerful advantages), and get Groove, a hugely powerful collaboration system, all of which scales cheaper as your organization gets bigger.
