Google+, which has yet to be determined as a worthy opponent to Facebook, has been gifted with the big political name of Barack Obama. Or rather, his reelection campaign.

Thus far, the page has posted five times, the first saying “Welcome to the Obama 2012 Google+ page. We’re still kicking the tires and figuring this out, so let us know what you’d like to see here and your ideas for how we can use this space to help you stay connected to the campaign”.

The new addition has yet to show if it’ll contribute to the popularity of the social networking site.

One of the first things I do upon waking up in the morning is roll over, my eyes squinting with lethargy in the semi darkness, and check my Facebook. About an hour later, as I brush my teeth or apply my makeup, I check it again. Throughout the day, whether in class or eating lunch I am always ready to check up on the lives of the few hundred people who make up my list of friends. Facebook, and its odd mix of voyeurism and real human connection, has attracted millions upon millions of people to join. It and the newly popular Google+ have a strict policy of only allowing members to join if they are willing to share their real name.

These “nymwars”, as they have dubbed on Twitter, are raging between those who want to remain separated from their online personas and websites like Facebook that remain steadfast in their affirmation that requiring the use of real names leads to better online behavior and an easier way for others to find you on the internet. In many ways, this is a debate that leaves me with mixed feelings. As someone who is young and lives for Facebook and social networking, it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to hide themselves. For most of my friends, the entire reason for having a Facebook is to show off those drunken pictures from Friday night, or the ring your boyfriend just gave you. The point of Facebook , at least as I see it, is to let the world see the best and happiest parts of your life, even if they tell a lie about who you are.

The fact that my name attached to everything I do while on Facebook has  prevented me from speaking up on a rude status or posting an embarrassing photo. The fact that other people, people who actually know me and see me in the hallway or at work the next day, will see what I have said and done online has definitely stayed my hand from doing pretty stupid things. Then again, I am somewhat conservative in my activities because there are undoubtedly people who post and say outlandish things without worrying about the real world consequences their statements cause. It does make me wonder though, would those kind of things happen more often if Facebook allowed us to operate under an alias? I tend to think so.

To see the dark side of the internet, the side with people who say rude and horrible things indiscriminately is very easy. All you need to do is go to an article on Kim Kardashian or a story about President Obama. The comment sections of these pages are rarely full of thoughtful and well articulated answers. Instead they are littered with comments that are racist, ageist, sexist, and any kind of “ist” you can think of. In the real world are the people behind the fake names in the comment section that hateful? Would they be able to look the same person they are bashing in a forum in the face and say what they have written? Probably not, and it is for that reason alone that I am more inclined to believe that it is better for social networking websites to have policies of real names only.

Even though Google+ has recently relented and will now allow pseudonyms, I cannot help but think a victory has not been won. Bullies and those who would seek to hurt others online depend upon the ambiguity that internet handles give them. Yet, supporters of internet pseudonyms are adamant that Facebook and others only want real names, not because transparency of identity is morally correct, but  because they profit by giving those names to advertising companies. This may be true, and I am personally annoyed when I get advertisements on Facebook. But in reality, they really aren’t obnoxious enough to warrant a call for names to be hidden. Proponents of pseudonyms also say that this ambiguity protects those who could otherwise not voice their opinion. Whether it is a young gay man in a small town or a woman who is the victim of abuse, without the protection of obscurity they would not be honestly state what they believe. i am in complete agreement with these sentiments, but I feel like these occurrences are too rare to outweigh the bile that people who are hiding behind a fake name spew while on the internet. I am aware that my actual name is one of my most important assets in my life, and I use it on the internet with caution. The fact that what I say holds me accountable makes me wiser, and couldn’t we all do with a little more wisdom?

We reported on this type of problem back in November. A problem with domain name servers may be negatively affecting Comcast internet customers.

Four days ago, a broad DNS attack was reported that hit the sites of UPS, Acer, and others in a coordinated attack that may have been carried out by Turkish hackers. That was a hack on the NetNames DNS provider.

TechCrunch.com also reported at 11:30 p.m. Thursday that Microsoft services, including Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Office 365 were all down because of a DNS problem. Service was restored about four hours later.

Tonight, some Comcast customers in Boston have reported that “the lights are on” on their cable modem, but websites will not load. Changing the DNS servers on your router and/or computer to Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as secondary) just as we recommended in November, seemed to fix the problem. Make sure you restart your computer or other device before trying to get back online.

Are you having/did you have Internet problems? Let us know where/when by commenting on this story!

Advertising giant and search engine default Google has agreed to forfeit $500 million in proceeds it received from allowing Canadian pharmacies to illegally target American consumers for prescription drugs, the Justice Department announced.

“The Department of Justice will continue to hold accountable companies who in their bid for profits violate federal law and put at risk the health and safety of American consumers,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, in a statement. “This settlement ensures that Google will reform its improper advertising practices with regard to these pharmacies while paying one of the largest financial forfeiture penalties in history.”

Google had sold the ads through its AdWords network.

The news was announced at press conference Wednesday morning in Providence.

As a general rule, the shipment of prescription drugs from foreign pharmacies to people inside the United States violates the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and in the case of controlled prescription drugs, the Controlled Substances Act, according to federal officials.

According to the statement, Google knew as early as 2003 that it was usually illegal for its Canadian pharmacy advertisers to ship drugs to the US.

Besides the patent illegality of it, federal regulators obviously take no steps to verify the legitimacy or chemical makeup of foreign drugs.

“This investigation is about the patently unsafe, unlawful, importation of prescription drugs by Canadian on-line pharmacies, with Google’s knowledge and assistance, into the United States, directly to U.S. consumers,” said U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha. “It is about taking a significant step forward in limiting the ability of rogue on-line pharmacies from reaching U.S. consumers, by compelling Google to change its behavior. It is about holding Google responsible for its conduct by imposing a $500 million forfeiture, the kind of forfeiture that will not only get Google’s attention, but the attention of all those who contribute to America’s pill problem.”

The Boston Globe reported that in May Google noted in a regulatory filing that it had set aside $500 million to settle a Justice Department investigation of “certain” advertisers.

Google will buy Motorola’s former phone making division, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion in cash, marking the search engine giant’s largest acquisition to date.

“Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. “Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers.”

Google Android competes directly with iPhone, Blackberry, and Microsoft Windows-based devices. Mobility makes smartphones for the Android, but sales have floundered, especially against the iPhone/iPad.

Motorola Mobility split from the rest of the company in January.

In the sale, Google will pay $40.00 per share, 63 percent over Motorola’s closing stock price on Friday.

The Associated Press reported that Google is likely interested in Motorola’s many, many patents on mobile phone technology, as a consortium of its competitors, which included Microsoft, Apple and Blackberry maker Research In Motion, recently won the chance to buy thousands of patents from bankrupt Canadian networking gear maker Novell.

We could be only weeks away from the next great iPhone release.

Apple will release the iPhone 5 on September 7, and it will come preloaded with iOS 5, according to a report on the website International Business Times.

At least 200 new features are expected in the iOS 5 launch, which Apple has already confirmed for fall.

The competition faced by Google’s Nexus 4G puts Apple in a position to have to make a move, perhaps more quickly than they anticipated. We can only assume that the iPhone 5 will be a 4G phone, since every other major competitor has gone that way.

Google has never been accused of sitting idly by, what with it still being the number 1 search engine across the world, and constantly trying to branch out into other fields that are already dominated by other juggernauts like Skype and Facebook.

On Google’s blog, they have just announced a new social media function called Google+ which is trying to incorporate your online world and real world experience into one.

Google+ is actually several different social media ideas to get you involved with the people in your network, both on and off line.

• +Cirlcle is a way to connect with a select few people in your social network of friends. Instead of blasting the world you interact with a “circle” of friends with the same likes.
• +Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends. This sounds like it would be the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook combined.
• +Hangouts By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face. In other words, this would be the equivalent of Face Time on a phone or Skype.
• +Mobile has three counterparts such as +location, +instant upload, +huddle. Each of these make your phone a way to connect with your circle online offline, by giving your location where they could join you for fun, by checking out a photo you just took, and by coordinating with a meetup that you’ve planned.

As you can see Google+ is not only stepping into the social media landscape, it is trying to carve out its own niche as well. It is combining several popular medias such as Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Skype. Why use all four when you can have it all in one place?

Want to get in on the action? Right now it is currently available in the Android Market and will be available at some point in the future on other platforms.

Google is becoming more of an internet giant everyday it seems. Today they announced their launch of something new called Music Beta. It is a service that will allow users to upload their music to the site where they would then be able to stream it. What do you think of this new service being provided by the company? Want to get in on this service? Since it is in a beta format, they is accepting request at music.google.com

But according to Billboard, this is not what the company wanted. They actually wanted deals with the major music labels to effectively offer a service to people but per Zahavah Levine, representative for the Google who was part of the negations process lays blame for the company not getting what they want.

“We’ve been in negotiations with the industry for a different set of features, with mixed results,” she told Billboard the night before the announcement was made. “[But] a couple of major labels were less focused on innovation and more on demanding unreasonable and unsustainable business terms.”

What did Google actually want? They wanted “to offer a scan-and-match style locker service — where instead of uploading different copies of the same track to store in a locker for each users, the service would scan users’ libraries and match the songs they own to a centralized server, paying rightsholders for each stream.”

All of this was to coincide with Google’s music player app which will be available for Android smartphones. With so many services offering similar options, is Google becoming a bit greedy in its need to expand in every market? Or is their room for what they are offering?

Google is no longer top dog. Apple has taken the spot from which Google has had for the past four years. In a study conducted by Millward Brown, a site geared towards marketing trends, they determined that premium trumps free.

The companies have contrasts between them, and with a premium service like Apple, the fact that they pushed Google from the top has to do with their business model.

Per the site “Google is the archetypal Internet brand, with free services and open systems. Premium-priced Apple eschews the open model in favor of what Steve Jobs refers to as an “integrated” model.”

This is working for Apple in a big way, and it is this consistency that makes the brand a strong one. Regardless of which Apple product you use, the interface and design is both easy and familiar for its users which is probably why Apple consumers continue to purchase their products time and time again.

This is good news for the company that has had bad press lately over their tracking system. With this news, can Apple maintain their top spot?

Google has announced that it will begin to start rolling out the new Google Talk video chat on Android devices.

If you have an Android phone or device you will be able to video or voice chat with anyone who has compatible devices such as an Android tablet or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. This will work over and 3G or 4G data network or over Wi-Fi.

The way this will work is in your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next your contacts and all you have to do is touch the button and you will be able to connect with them.

If say you needed to check something while you were chatting, the video pauses automatically so that way you can go back to the phone’s home screen or even another app.

The feature will be added to the Nexus S devices in the next few weeks and will be eventually be added to other Android 2.3+ devices.

(Mashable)

Google has added another service to its growing list of things they offer: Google Offers.

It is a direct competitor for Groupon, which was ridiculed earlier this year for the poor taste in super bowl commercials, but it also put them on the map of coupons and offers.

With an already growing number of sites offering similar or the same thing (such as LivingSocial ect.) can Google Offer really offer anything new to the table?

Mashable first reported the news.

Google tried to buy Groupon for $6 billion just months ago. Groupon declined the offer and is preparing to launch an IPO at about $15 billion.

Well it appears that since Google couldn’t buy them, then creating their own service is one way of trying to beat them at their own game.

Can Google succeed? Or will Groupon or even LivingSocial, who already have an established customer base, will they still continue to succeed with the giant that is Google?

Google TV announced on Monday that several media companies will be partnering with them in an effort to offer web content and programs via the television. Some of the companies included in this deal are Twitter, HBO and CNBC.

Google’s technology will be made available for consumers in the next few weeks. This new technology will be built into Sony high definition televisions as well as Blu-ray players. Also, it will be built into Logitech set top boxes for viewers with already own TVs they want to use. Logitech will be building their own remote control so one can search on the TV and the web at the same time.

Viewers can use the internet and watch TV at the same time on the same screen with Google TV. HBO subscribers can use HBO GO and watch their favorite shows on demand. Viewers can also shop while they watch TV. Additonal content services such as Amazon On Demand, Netflix and other applications will be available.

Website like Pandora and Youtube have built new versions on their sites for the TV screens. “One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers,” Ambarish Kenghe, developer product manager for Google TV, wrote in a company blog post.

Viewers with iPhones or Androids can use their phone as a remote control and “fling” a show they are watching from their phones onto the television.

According to Forrester Research, 43 million homes in the United States will have internet connected televisions by 2015.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of legendary arcade title Pac-Man, Google has launched its first playable doodle, allowing Internet searchers to play the game, in its entirety right in their browser.

That’s right, all 255 Pac-Man levels, plus the 256th, the Kill Screen, are accessible right now.

Play Pac-Man, in your broswer.

The doodle, what Google officially calls the themed illustrations, is the first playable doodle in Google’s history.

Simply press the “Insert Coin” button and you’re good to go! Also, we’re not liable for your boss’ anger.

Google is spending a ton of money in Washington.

According to public records, Google spent $800,000 during Q1 2009 on lobbying and about $4 million during all of 2009. But for Q1 2010, Google has already spent about $1.4 million.

“They’re now one of the highest rollers in Washington,” said John M. Simpson, a consumer advocate with the non-profit Consumer Watchdog group.

“Despite what Google claimed, it’s not about consumers at all,” said Simpson. “Google is seeking laws that let the company do whatever it wants in its quest for record profits. If that means record sums on influence-peddling, so be it.”

Google did not return requests for comment.

ROME — The opportunity to walk virtually through the wonders of Pompeii is a powerful way to boost Italian tourism.

If you can’t be one of the 2.5 million tourists who wander through the streets of Pompeii every year, you now have another option: Google’s Street View.

The 360-degree panoramic street-level service debuted last week in the Statues, temples, amphitheaters, as well as close-up views of houses, bakeries and baths are now visible on the search engine’s free mapping service.

With just a few clicks, you can easily take a tour of ancient Rome, enter Egypt’s Great Pyramid or climb the Acropolis in Greece.

The problem is that too often these computer reconstructions look the same. As you move your mouse around, you are taken into unrealistic, clean, lifeless, plastic-coated landscapes.

Google’s Street View application offers a much more realistic and lively experience, making you feel as if you were walking down a street among many other tourists.

Launched in 2007, Google’s Street View provides panoramic street-level views of more than 100 cities around the world. And now you can find the ancient Pompeii as well.

Google is scheduled to release its social network feature called “Buzz” over the next few days, according to PC Mag. Google describes Buzz as an ambitious attempt to combine the Gmail Web interface with status updates and media-sharing technology, making Google a more complete experience.

Google’s Buzz includes many appealing features, according to CNET. Users can post text, links and photos and can link their Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and Google Reader accounts to their Buzz streams to see information produced by friends on those networks. Buzz also includes a customizable algorithm that allows the user to pick and choose what sort of information and updates are displayed from their friend’s posts.

According to PC Mag, one the greatest strengths of this social network is its ability to separate public posts from private posts. Buzz users will be able to post updates publicly for their followers, like Twitter, but they can also post updates privately, like Facebook, for their friend’s eyes only. Since Buzz is a Google invention, users have access to Buzz using Google Maps via their mobile device. Users get the option of posting their exact locations on Buzz, as well as showing nearby restaurants, stores and other places of interest.

PC Mag states that Google will be gradually releasing Buzz to its users by displaying an icon beneath the Inbox icon on the left panel. Alternatively, users may get a full welcome page when they log in, touting the new feature. There will be an option to either try it out or ignore it and go to the regular Gmail inbox. Although Buzz has several minor advantages over Facebook, only time will reveal whether or not people will be inclined to switch from one social network to another.

If you forked over $20 for a year of 10GB of storage in your Gmail account, you may be in for a pleasant surprise today. Now, instead of 10 gigs, you get 80.

“While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further,” Google said in an e-mail to users. “On Tuesday, November 10, we increased the size of each of our tiers to make storage even more affordable and accessible. For the same $20.00 per year, you’ll now get 80 GB, 8 times as much storage as before.”

Your plan will be automatically upgraded and your new quota will automatically show up in your account in the next 24 hours, Google said.

“We hope you’ll like the extra space,” Google added.

Though dismissed at its origins, Twitter has become one of the most important ways to keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet. This was probably most apparent when Michael Jackson passed away earlier this year, singlehandedly bringing down AIM, slowing social networking sites to a crawl, and convincing Google that the hoards of people suddenly searching for “Michael Jackson” were apparently a DDoS attack.

Google saw the millions of people searching for the pop-artists name and assumed they had to of come from an automated source, either requiring them to perform a CAPATCHA or denying their request altogether. Realized they were missing a key market opportunity”"second to not inventing Twitter in the first place, of course”"Google and Bing have both reached agreements with Twitter and Facebook to start indexing peoples’ tweets and public status updates, respectively.

Bing’s Twitter search page is live now, as is Google’s Twitter incorporation. We tried a few searches that are trending right now (Ed: Are we really still talking about balloon boy?), and sure enough, both search engines displayed a few results. Bing also has a tag cloud with trending topics organized by how hot they are.

It will be interesting to see how well the two companies are and handling the intense amount of link and hashtag spam occurring and to see how successful they’ll be at keeping it from befuddling search results. Of course, now that Twitter has included adding spam links and non-relevant hanstags as violations to their terms of service, it looks like everyone is trying to keep a handle on the problem.

The most extensive Twitter search, set at search.twitter.com, only indexes two weeks worth of tweets, so it’ll be interesting to see how long Google keeps tweets in their indexes. Right now, there is no easy way to find a specific tweet that you sent in the past. That being said, it also doesn’t appear that the purpose of indexing these tweets is for long-term storage”"Google and Bing are probably only looking for a way to figure out what’s hot now.

Critics have also been dismissive of Twitter for a long time, pointing out that without ads, the company has no monetization strategy, and will never turn a profit. While making a profit is secondary when you have millions in venture funding coming in already, but licensing its API to Microsoft and Google is a great way to make money, and Twitter may have finally stumbled upon their key to monetary success.

It’s amazing how strong the rumor mill is the age of Twitter. Despite making no official press announcement, everyone and their mother is apparently aware that Google is going to launch a music service in the near future which will allow users to stream a huge catalog of songs right from within the Google search window. So while we’re reporting on rumors we haven’t personally verified, you don’t really have any reason not to believe us.

Google is partnering with iLike and Lala for a new music service. Both of these sites allow users to stream samples of any song in their catalogs, while Lala allows users to stream whole songs once, on-demand before requiring a small fee. The sites also allow users to embed the stream in a site. Because both sites have signed deals will all four major record labels, the vast majority of music will be available.

Google has long had a music search built into results, despite never having advertised it much, useable with a simple “music:” operator. Results included a listing of songs and albums that matched the query, with links to music sellers to purchase the songs. While this is strictly conjecture, we’re predicting that Google will start incorporating song streams directly into the search results.

While the music labels are usually seemingly adverse to any incorporation of new technology, they’ll likely be happy with all the extra eyes being directed to sites where users might purchase music legally. The offical announcement is scheduled for October 28, so we’ll let you know if anything changes.

Google is throwing its hat in the e-book ring, and per usual Google policy, they’re injecting their own “don’t be evil” spin on things. Whereas the book offerings of Amazon are well known for their Orwellian DRM restrictions that are available only on the Kindle, Google will offer its books free of any restrictions in an open format for all devices, from readers to mobile phones to computers.

Coming in early 2010, Google will open its e-book store with 50,000 titles. The books would be indexed and searchable via the Google Books site. This also means that purchasers will have access to the purchased books via a web interface as well as on their reading devices. Users’ browsers will also allow the books to be cached for offline reading using Google Gears.

While nothing official relating to Google’s new OS announced, a web-app for reading e-books fits in perfectly with Google’s plans to moving everything into a Chrome browser-OS-web application system. Also, there are many companies currently offering e-books that have been a round for a while, so Google is hardly new to the game. At the same time, e-books have yet to truly catch on yet.

We, of course, would like to think that this is only because Google wasn’t playing the game.

Artist's rendition of the angry mob of Google workers outside the Apple offices in Cupertino.

In the ongoing volleying between Apple and Google over the Google Voice application, Google has released an unredacted version of the letter it sent to the FCC. In it, Google states that Apple has unequivocally rejected the Google voice application for the iPhone.

The Google Voice application was supposed to allow iPhone users to access all of the features that are part of the Grand Central system that Google acquired back in 2007, including one VoIP phone number that rings all of your phone numbers, integrated SMS, and customizable voicemail and call-screening depending on the caller. Rumor has it that Apple and AT&T are worried that the Google app could replace core functionalities on the iPhone”"or eat into AT&T’s bottom line.

Here are the relevant quotes. Google states in its letter to the FCC which discussed negotiations between the two companies:

Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone.

This stands in direct contrast to Apple’s statement in a press release:

We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.

In any case, one of these companies is lying, because they can’t both be true. Google claims that Apple rejected both the Google Voice and the Google Latitude applications because they duplicated functions the iPhone is already capable of doing and might create customer confusion. This is, of course, laughable considering the number of calculators, stopwatches, email apps, and all the other apps available in the store that blatantly duplicate available functionality.

Google and Apple used to be a match made in heaven, until the two companies found themselves in ever-growing competition. With Google throwing its full weight behind the mobile open-source Android platform, they’re increasingly finding themselves in direction competition with Apple”"so much so, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board of directors.

Only time will tell if these two companies will ever be able to make nice. We sure hope so, because the idea of using MapQuest instead of the pre-installed Google maps application on our iPhone makes us shudder.

And so we flip open another chapter in the debacle between Apple and Google. As reported by the Washington Post, Google has just let loose a game changer by releasing part of their previously redacted letter to the FCC. You guessed it: the content pretty much completely contradicts Apple’s. Someone must be lying.

Apple maintains, at least since yesterday, that they are working with Google on the Google Voice App for iPhone.

Apparently Google is saving its best for last. It has in its possession an image of the rejection letter. So Apple will most likely approve the Google Voice App to save face, and we’ll probably see it in a few days as the Post speculated.

The questions remains, if Apple did lie to a federal regulatory agency, what will come of that?

Google announced in a conference hosted by TechCrunch on Monday that they have released a new document reading format for online use. Referred to as Fast Flip, this site is meant to mimic the feeling, process, and texture of reading a real book. Google, of course, thinks this will lead to more advertising revenue for publishers and themselves.

Fast Flip is indeed a fast way to scan across the many websites who have signed on. Instead of loading every website you might want to read, Flat Flip displays screenshots of the websites’ stories, organized by category, topic, and headline.

The homepage at Google's Fast Flip.

The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be flipped through similar to a PDF file. About 30-40 publishers, web outlets and broadcasters have signed on to support this new format right now. The groups include such giants as Newsweek, Businessweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

This is part of Google’s Dedication to publishers, which includes funneling more profits towards publishers and helping newspaper companies to develop a model by which they can charge for access to premium website content. Google hopes Fast Flip will become popular by making online reading easier and more enjoyable, leading to showing more advertisements to more people and ideally give most of the ad revenue to publishers. It would only make sense that Newspapers would want fast flip to be successful”"but not too successful. The newspaper executives still need people to actually go to their sites where they can charge for ads without having to share with Google.

Clicking on an article embiggens that article. A sidebar allows you to navigate to other related stories.

This seems like a great partnership, further expanding Google’s reach and influence while preserving one of the oldest and most fundamental arts of American culture. That being said, it also sounds like Google might be attempting to reinvent the web’s wheel, the PDF. As with most Internet start-ups, only time will tell.

Vonage for the win!

Talk about a victory. Apple has approved a Vonage App while Google Voice can’t even get near the App Store with its own software.

“Vonage is currently conducting a beta test and general availability will be announced at a later date,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “This new service, along with the recent launch of the Vonage World unlimited calling plan, continues Vonage’s heritage of using innovative technology to create significant value for its current and future customers.”

Vonage’s stock (NYSE: VG) soared almost 20 percent on App news.

Google’s march toward world domination”"we mean, organizing the world’s information, took a huge step forward today as they announced their intentions to release an open-source Google operating system in late 2009 and provide it on netbooks in 2010. Such a Google OS would be very lightweight, and dedicate much its processing power towards web-based applications in Google Chrome, hence Google naming the operating system “Google Chrome OS.”

While it’s unexpected that such an announcement would come today, it actually makes sense in the grand scheme of things. When one looks at all the web applications Google offers”"Gmail, calendar, Google Docs, a desktop search”"organizing these programs into a tightly integrated package at a good price seems very logical. When one considering that Google’s price for just about everything is “free” it seems like an even better deal. It’s worth nothing that such a concept isn’t strictly original. In the recent past, Wal-mart sold a $199 computer that came with a Ubuntu distribution, gOS, which featured web applications heavily.

Google already has one operating system, but Android is a mobile platform, and Google says in its blog post that Chrome OS is a “is a new project, separate from Android.” Most applications written for Chrome OS would reside in the Chrome browser, making it exceptionally cross-platform. (This is, of course, assuming Chrome ever makes it to OS X. Our fingers are crossed.) Google also promises the OS will be lightweight so it can boot and get you to the web quickly where you can do your business.

Why should you care? Because now Google is going after Microsoft, Apple, and everyone else at the throat. No longer are Microsoft’s cash cows safe; with Google Docs rapidly becoming a viable web alternative to Office, Google Chrome OS could now start to threaten the Windows user base as well. Clearly the take over isn’t going to occur overnight. Depending on who’s counting, Google Chrome users make up about 2% of the browser share, while Firefox is at about 20% and IE remains king at around 60%.

But Android, which currently runs on only one phone offered by T-Mobile, has still managed to attract a huge number of application developers and amassed a sizable app library. Between Google’s solid web applications, these dedicated developers, the general drive to offload computing to the “cloud,” and Google’s bottomless pockets, this very well could develop into more than just a twinkle in Google’s eye.

While we would love to get our hands on an OS X version of Chrome alone, we’re even more excited by the prospect of running an entire Google OS on our computer. We’ll keep an eye out to the future for you.

Google, the popular search engine (and by popular we mean the number one visited website on the entire Internet), is famous for continually altering their homepage layout and is doing so again today, but this time in commemoration of one of the most memorable video games of all time.

You guessed it, Tetris.

The seemingly ancient game turns 25 years young today and to celebrate Google is decking out their page with the letters of Google spelled out in Tetris form. If you haven’t already visited Google after 4PM EST, when the North American page went live, head over to Google to see what you’ve been missing.

Long live Tetris. You’ve aggravated and been loved by gamers for a quarter century.

When you’re looking for a single fact or answer to something, a straight up Google search is probably your best approach. But what if you’re more interested in, say, a set of facts? Well you have two recently launched tools to help you untangle the web of information available.

Launched last month to much fanfare (but, unfortunately, to less critical acclaim), Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine that crawls the Web to collect, parse, and curate all the data on the Internet “" certainly a lofty goal. The data used by Wolfram Alpha comes from government and public databases (think CIA Factbook, the NCBI, and Wikipedia). The power behind Wolfram Alpha comes from Mathematica, which helps it graph mathematical functions, maps, musical staves, and stock quotes among a seemingly endless list of possibilities.

While this sounds all well and good, it’s better just to look at some results. Try, for example, a search for the Boston Red Sox which returns a neatly formatted page of historical data as well as current standings. Or for the opposite end of the spectrum, something like a ham and cheese sandwich. (Who knew that a ham and cheese sandwich contains more riboflavin than 93% of foods out there?) For the molecular biologists among us, I highly suggest looking at amyloid beta precursor protein (known as APP) results. The financiers would likely be more interested in the stock quote for APP. Aerospace engineers, check out this NACA airfoil model. It truly is sheer data pr0n.

But Google is never one to be left out “" remember that time they’re went head to head with Amazon by selling e-books? “" and today they released Google Squared, which produces your results in a spreadsheet format. Spending a few minutes with it, you’ll quickly realize it’s nowhere near as powerful as Wolfram Alpha, but it has potential. For example, the Google square for the Sox lists how the players bat and throw, along with some images. You can add a category to the results as well from the suggestions (Pedroia only makes $500k a year?), or try picking a totally new one on your own. The pages for cheeses and planets are equally informative.

The major downside to these tools is that all the facts are represented in your results without their supporting websites. Every time you look at a website, you’re subconsciously judging the validity of the site. The more typos and blink tags you see, the less you tend to believe the fact presented there. While Google allows you to mouse over to see the specific source of the data, Wolfram Alpha offers only aggregate source listings. Considering the fact that Wikipedia is sometimes used as source, this is disconcerting. Of course, you can always go search the source information on your own, but you would probably use Google to do that, which will make you wonder why you didn’t just start there.

In any case, there any many searches on both sites that return no results at all. Google Squared fails particularly in most science and math related pursuits while Wolfram Alpha will pick seemingly random searches that it will have no idea what to do with. These tools are clearly in their infancy, but also could change the face of search in the future. For now, they’re mostly fascinating gimmicks.

They will also certainly decrease my productivity for a long time to come.

Of course, to “google” something has become synonymous with the mere act of searching something on the Internet, but that hasn’t stopped other companies from developing their search programs. Last week, Microsoft rebranded their Live.com search engine as the curiously titled Bing. How does it hold up?

After a few matched test searches, Bing is a decent search engine; its results are relatively similar to Google’s for most searches. The site provides an auto-suggest before you search, terms to search within your results on the left bar, and related searches on the right side. Image and video searches are included when appropriate, though be careful what videos you’re searching for because the results auto-play when you mouse over them. If you mouse over the right side of a search result, a nifty summary box will pop-up. Also, the home page features a daily rotating wallpaper with related facts, which is certainly interesting if not entirely necessary. In essence, you could probably do worse than Bing.

As for real advantages to using Bing though, we found none. The subpage links that Google provided are certainly much more useful than Bing’s. A search for “iPhone” on Google turned up the Apple page, the Wikipedia page, shopping results, and video results. Bing’s results had images, but its suggested related searches were “iPhones software” and “iPhones accessories,” which basically made the results feel spammy and dirty, not to mention grammatically incorrect.

When I “binged” myself “" don’t you see how odd that sounds, Microsoft? “" we had to get to the fourth page before there was a web result related to me. Googling us turned up our Google profile on the front page. Google also found our Twitter before Bing did. Granted, we have a name that’s relatively common in the Western Hemisphere, and we haven’t really done anything to merit much Internet fame, so your mileage may vary. And yes, we know, searching for yourself isn’t the most necessary use for a search engine, but it is fun, and everyone does it anyway, so the search engine we use should do it right.

Overall, to us, Google wins on the sheer integration it has with all of its services. When one search turns up images, videos, a stock quote, a search within the site box, and considers my vast search history, searches my desktop and my email, all on top of good results from the Web at large, what use is there for another search engine? Google also has a decent partnership with many social networking sites that return results from those sites. With your Internet identity becoming almost as important as your real one, this is quite a boon.

Maybe Bing will prove useful one day when Google fails us or to those who don’t know how to reset their default search engine in Internet Explorer, but until then, we won’t hold our breath.

Up until the last century or so, if you needed to talk to someone, you wrote a letter, signed it, and someone or something carried it to where it needed to go. Then came telephones, and with those, the advent of real-time communications. Then came email, and with it instantaneous conversation and information sharing. Now, Google thinks it has the next step in the evolution of how we’ll communicate and collaborate online.

First, the problems with what we have now. Instant messaging works well for very small groups of people, but becomes cumbersome in larger groups. Emails allow for dialectical conversation, but don’t occur in real time, and can become fragmented with side emails that spin off into their own conversations. Newer people are brought into the fray, and often don’t have the complete conversation before them.

Google Wave is sort of like a chat-room on steroids. Equal parts group-instant messaging, document collaboration, and wiki, Wave allows users to edit the rich media that makes up our Internet today. Users start a wave by adding text, dragging and dropping photos, documents, videos, and any other embeddable media into the wave. All edits are visible in real time; you’ll watch as your threaded conversations expand word by word, letter by letter. Once the wave is complete, it’s stored for future reading or even playback, so you can watch as the wave develops and unfolds.

The technology even comes with an open API, so other programmers can embed Google Wave into their own sites and projects or build their own extensions to add functionality to Google Wave itself. Possible extensions suggested by Google include robot-style automated participants. (Maybe this is just our hope, but could this be the best customer support tool ever devised?)

Currently in a developer-only release, Google is eyeing a public beta in the near future.

Archives provide endless amounts of information about virtually any topic, but who wants to sit in a stuffy library or even worse,‚  library basement, looking through record after record to find what you’re looking for.

The world wide web has revolutionized they way we do things today, and that includes archiving. Now with a simple search and click of the mouse, primary documents, sometimes fragile, are right at our fingertips. Here’s a listing of some of the most useful and interesting archives or databases we’ve come across.

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

The LIFE photo archive hosted by Google ranks as one of my favorites. There are over a million photographs available by simply going to the Google images page. Also, LIFE archived photos will automatically generate when you add :life to any keyword. Some of these photos have never been published before and date back to the 1750s. The photos are organized by decade or category. and are further broken down into subcategories such as people, places, events, sports or culture.‚  The LIFE photo archives are simple to navigate and include a wealth of iconic images.

Library of Congress – Digital Collections

The Digital Collections of the Library of Congress are more than just photo archives. One can search through historic newspapers, over 1 million digital photographs, first person veteran accounts of their service, international materials and presentations, legislative records, historic maps, audio and video from American History & Culture, collections of performance art materials, and archived web sites.‚  Each set of archived material is divided into categories, which makes a specific topic easy to locate. In this dismal economy, who needs to take a trip to Washington when they can access the same treasures online?

Reboot Stereophonics – Archived music, discussions & articles

Reboot Stereophonics collects information pertaining to the Jewish culture. One section of the site, Stereophonics, exhibits lost Jewish audio from music archives as well as long-forgotten albums that were discovered in obscure thrift shops. Reboot Inspired is a collection of articles defining the Jewish identity and “rebooting” the traditions to make that identity resonate in people’s lives today. Another section of the site, Guilt & Pleasure, is a collection of different discussions that occurred regarding Jewish issues and the community. The entire Reboot Stereophics archives help to promote the healthy conversation about the Jewish identity today.

Internet Archive

Another great starting place is the Internet Archive. This is like the hub of all archives. There are sections for moving images, live music, texts, audio, software and even web pages. Using the Wayback Machine, you can surf through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996. Related projects and additional archive websites are also listed. Another great tool is the open education resources. Lectures, videos, free courses and supplemental videos are all available for personal use. There’s also a database of legal downloads including audio books, poetry, collections of the Grateful Dead and more.

IMDb

Although more of a database instead of archive, Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is the Internet’s largest collection of movies, past and present. IMDb has rapidly grown over the years and now includes more than 6,000 full-length feature films and TV episodes that can be watched for free. Up-to-the minute news stories are also generated in their news feeds from a wide variety of entertainment publications. This is my go-to archive when I can’t remember what actor stared in what movie,etc.

Archives.gov

Archives.gov is a good starting place if you’re looking for archived material. The National Archives Records Administration is the organization that is charged with holding Federal Records including those famous documents such as the Declaration of Independence along with public records such as military records. On the site you can access special online exhibits and featured documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Magna Carta. There are also links to genealogy sites if you’re looking to search your personal history.

Even with the popular “search everything” plugin, we’ve decided to move off the WordPress search feature and implement Google’s AdSense-based Custom Search.

The same search bar you see up top is now programmed for the Google Custom Search. Go to it!

The best thing about Custom Search is that it allows us to not only search by all facets of the site (like who wrote it) but that it lets us import all the sites in our network to one searchable database.

Therefore, you can search PSA, OTR, MadeHand, PRrag, Blast, all the internal blast blogs, This is God Given, and even some of our regular writers’ personal blogs all in one place!

While the rest of the economy may be in the tank, Adobe’s earnings beat expectations.

Tuesday, Adobe said it earned 50 cents per share in its fiscal third quarter, which ended August 29. That beat Wall Street’s expectations of 46 cents per share and its own estimates of 39 to 41 cents per share.

Revenue climbed 4 percent to $887 million, beating Wall Street’s forecast of $877 million, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Adobe stock climbed 2 percent before losing ground with everyone else late in the day.

In other news, Google was down over 5 percent Wednesday. Amazon lost almost 8 percent.

Apple’s iPhone has been dominating the handheld market since its release last June, I’m sure you’ve heard.  Since then, it has been tough for other companies like Samsung to get people talking.

On November 5, the Open Handset Alliance was created.  This alliance, consisting of 34 hardware, software and telecommunications companies was founded with the collective goal of furthering the standards of mobile technologies.

A few years ago Google acquired Android Inc. and from there they’ve been building a product that is now just a few weeks away from reality.

“Google’s Android platform will launch in the next several weeks. It will be an HTC phone, likely the HTC Dream, and will be launched internationally on the T-Mobile network. A window of between Oct 15 and Nov 30,” says www.veturebeat.com.

According to ZDNet, September 15 is the release date of the phone at $150, which will be, “available to existing T-mobile users,” on that day. A more expensive version of the phone, at $399, will be available sometime in October.

For those of you who don’t know, Android is a program based off of the Linux OS which has the potential to increase the ease of web based applications on the go.  Likewise, this program is free and Google has been offering the tools to create programs for this system for a while now.  At launch, it’s got the potential to knock the iPhone out of your hand due to the ease of development and reliability of its software.

At this time there are no actual specs; nor are there any pictures of a potential model for this, “Gphone,” but considering the proximity of its actual release, they’re bound to come up in the next couple weeks.

Microsoft announced Friday their decision to offer to buy Yahoo!, taking all outstanding shares for $31 each in what would be a monster $44.6 billion deal. It would be a 62 percent bonus to shareholders holding a stock valued at under $20 Thursday.

Yahoo’s stock soared in early trading Friday, up over 50 percent at times.

“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.”

Yahoo said Friday it will “carefully and promptly” study Microsoft’s bid.

Microsoft made an offer to take over Yahoo! last year, but then chairman/CEO Terry Semel scoffed at it. But under shareholder pressure, Semel recently stepped aside. This new offer comes as the ink on new chairman Roy Bostock office door is still wet. In a letter, Microsoft also addressed Yahoo!’s current CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang.

In their letter, Microsoft said it could save at least $1 billion in cost savings generated by the combination, and that they would offer retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, leaders and employees.

“We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers,” Ballmer wrote in his letter to Yahoo!.

A combined Microsoft-Yahoo! force would be a stiff competitor to Google, who seems to have all but taken over the search engine world and leads in online advertising.

Microsoft said they would expect regulatory clearance and in the second half of 2008 if the deal is accepted.

The Associated Press has called the offer “unexpected.” Microsoft called the offer “compelling.” A struggling Yahoo! may have to carefully weigh their options.

Almost 400,000 members of Google’s social networking site, Orkut, were victimized by a new spam worm spreading around the site, said McAfee’s Avert Labs.

“While the worm doesn’t appear to harm users’ PCs, it does impact their profile and spread from friend to friend,” said McAfee. “This virus will add the user to a community called “Infectados pelo Virus Orkut” (“Infected by the Orkut Virus”) and starts to send messages to the friends of the infected user. Avert Labs believes Google is working to fight the worm.”

This raises concerns on how to keep the growing number of Web 2.0 sites safe and secure. MySpace and Facebook have faced similar issues recently, and everyone remembers the series of AIM Profile viruses and malicious code.

“I analyzed some suspicious scrap ’2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc’ from a bunch of friends on Orkut,” wrote McAfee’s Vinay Mahadik. “For a while it was all over Orkut!! Translated to English, it reads ’2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you.’”

The worm is spreading through Orkut’s recently introduced tool that allows users to write messages that contain HTML code. The ability to add Flash/Javascript content to Orkut scraps was only recently introduced.

Click here for the full Avert Labs blog post.

The form has been named W32/KutWormer by McAfee.