Google's News Timeline
Somewhat quietly (at least for Google) Google Labs has relaunched two new products. You can read the details regarding the relaunch here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/hard-at-play-in-google-labs-with.html.
E-Commerce Times reports that Google is seeking to acquire Twitter, the wildly popular 140-character-or-less micro-blogging service. This is after the world's largest social network Facebook made an offer of $500 million ($100 million of that in cash!) for Twitter last December, which was rejected.
Google now provides users of its suite of hosted applications with a way to quickly check the status of Google Apps services. The new Google Apps Status Dashboard tells you whether a given Apps service is down for everyone, or just for you. A very timely launch by Google, after a couple of hours of Gmail outage nearly caused an online panic yesterday.
Fresh from the Google Labs comes a new experimental feature for Gmail--the ability to use the application in offline mode and then transfer messages when an internet connection is available. This latest addition to the company's email service is certain to make life easier for people who communicate online on the move.
Google has extended the Service Level Agreement for the paid edition of its online productivity suite to offer 99.9% availability. Strictly speaking, the "three nines" uptime guarantee translates to less than 9 hours of service interruption per year, total, but Google's calculation of uptime will disregard outages shorter than 10 minutes. Read on for details.
In separate announcements this week, both Google and Microsoft stated their intentions to join the ranks of OpenID providers. OpenID is a protocol which gives users a way to sign in to multiple websites and web services using a single login. At first glance this is great news for everyone, since OpenID has the potential to change the tedious "different login for every site" practice. However, the specific implementations of the two tech giants may harm the wider community of OpenID providers and supporting sites.
Early adopters everywhere were quick to download Google Chrome -- an open source browser, based on the WebKit rendering engine. After some initial good-natured pranks about the quirks of the new browser, people are suddenly acting cautious. A number of personal blogs and media outlets are expressing concern about Chrome's end-user license agreement (EULA).
Google announced that its URL index has reached one trillion entries, eight years after passing the one billion mark. Each of the entries represents a unique URL, and there are 150 of those in Google's index for every living person on the planet.
Google released its own version of a free online encyclopedia. Currently, Wikipedia is the undisputed leader in collaboratively edited content, with 2,400,000 articles in the largest English edition, and scoring tens of millions unique visitors every month. Google's Knol will rely on experts in specific fields to edit articles, rather than open the process to the anonymous wide public.
Advertising from Google will be displayed alongside Yahoo! search results, after the two companies reached an agreement for shared use of AdSense technology. The non-exclusive advertising agreement was announced shortly after Yahoo! ended talks with Microsoft over possible investment and acquisitions by the software giant.
