Articles about Cloud

Rather than create another new destination social network like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, Google today announced that it has added social networking and location-based features into Gmail, Google Profiles, and Google Maps with a new service called Google Buzz.

Late last week, rumors surfaced that Google was debuting a new "Social Gmail" this week, and that really is kind of what Buzz is. With it, you can post status updates and share links, photos, and location-based updates with your Gmail contacts, and the content being posted by your contacts is automatically ranked according to your interactions with that contact. Ultimately, it's a lot like FriendFeed but with a Google flavor.

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During the few comments he was asked to make during his testimony before the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee earlier today, NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker was asked by Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Va.) whether Hulu -- a video Web service co-owned by NBC -- intentionally blocked the ability of Boxee's media center application for PCs to replay Hulu videos. Rep. Boucher's question was by way of ascertaining whether a combined Comcast + NBCU entity would routinely block competitors' access to programming it generated.

Zucker responded: "What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. We have several distributors...of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with, so we don't preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those that illegally take that content."

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Popular gadget blog Engadget has been forced to turn off comments for an undetermined period because the posters have gotten a bit overzealous with poor-form commentary.

In the post announcing the temporary ban today, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky said, "What is normally a charged -- but fun -- environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations... and that's just not acceptable. Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that's simply not the case."

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In a now very well-cited blog post from last Friday, Google Apps Senior Product Manager Rajen Sheth announced that as of March 1, Google Docs and Google Sites (the company's tool for building your own Web sites) will no longer support Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Web browser. A Google spokesperson told Betanews this afternoon that Sheth meant exactly what he said, and no more -- specifically, that the initial phase-out will begin a schedule of similar phase-outs for other apps in the Google Apps suite.

The statement should not be taken to mean, the spokesperson told Betanews, that the company's various Web properties (for instance, ad platforms) will no longer support IE6. Sheth was only speaking for the Google Apps team, we were told. YouTube, a Google division, announced its plan to phase out IE6 support last July.

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Google's revolutionary Internet phone, call management, and messaging service Google Voice has finally been reworked to fit within Apple's strict iPhone guidelines.

Last July, Google Voice was launched as a mobile application for BlackBerry and Android, but the popular iPhone platform was not included in the launch. Apple had apparently rejected Google's proposed app just like it had done weeks prior with Google's social geolocation service, Latitude.

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The Open Planning Project (TOPP) is a nonprofit organization that advocates the use of free and open source software in the public sector, and for more than ten years, TOPP's OpenGeo initiative has worked on creating an open environment for sharing geospatial data. Its principal product, GeoServer, is a free Java-based Geographic Information server built on open standards which lets users share and edit public geographic data.

Following the GeoServer 2.0.1 update that was released last week, OpenGeo today released OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 1.0, the complete package of open source mapping software that OpenGeo will professionally support.

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I'm not one to follow the lives of celebrities. I don't watch TMZ, and the very sound of Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart's voice is enough to make me nauseous. I turn my head as I walk past the supermarket tabloids in the checkout aisle because I could care less who Jennifer Aniston is dating this week or that Elvis was spotted in a rural Kentucky laundromat. I've got better things to do with my life than wonder how many more kids Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt want to adopt or when she plans on getting another tattoo.

For all my celeb-fatigue, though, I found it interesting this past weekend when I first learned about the Brangelina supercouple's separation not from television, radio, or a newspaper, but from my Twitter feed. After I sarcastically retweeted the supposed news, I heard from a number of friends that they, too, had gotten the news from online sources.

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In the official YouTube blog today, the popular Google-owned video sharing service announced it will be launching a streaming rental service on Friday in partnership with the Sundance Film Festival.

It will only include a handful of movies (five from Sundance 2009-2010, and "a small collection" from other US partners across different industries) that will be available to rent until Sunday, January 31.

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In an announcement early this morning, Microsoft stated it is altering the policy of its search engine Bing with regard to retaining personal data collected from its users. Under a new policy that may take as long as 18 months to implement, the company says, it will anonymize its data logs after only six months of retention rather than the previous 18, in compliance with a European Union directive -- perhaps the first major US-based search engine to comply.

In April 2008, the European Union's advisory body of member states' telecommunications ministers, called the Article 29 Working Party, advised that search engines doing business in their region should anonymize the personally identifiable data they've collected on their users after a six-month period. The theory here has been, after six months' time, search engines won't be able to make much use of them to refine the efficacy of current queries -- the original excuse for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to keep such data for longer periods.

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Last May, Aza Raskin and the team at Mozilla Labs introduced Jetpack, essentially an extensibility model for the organization's Firefox browser that enables new JavaScript apps to modify the functionality of the browser on the fly. The goal is that anyone who could create a Web page could use exactly the same tools (HTML, CSS, and ordinary JavaScript, plus the appropriate APIs) to build a Firefox add-on. Now on version 0.7, Jetpack is slowly gaining momentum.

But where will that momentum lead? Is Mozilla seriously considering the Jetpack development model as an eventual replacement for XUL (XML User Interface language, pronounced "zool" like the refrigerator-based creature from Ghostbusters)? That was the question ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asked earlier this week, in a blog post entitled, "Is Mozilla preparing to ditch add-ons as we know them?"

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Often, when a big company releases a new piece of hardware or software, smaller companies will launch their own products that ride in the bigger product's proverbial draft. But this time, One big launch has rolled another smaller launch in with it.

Today, Google announced it will be expanding the storage capacity of Google Docs to 1GB, and allow single files up to 250 MB to be uploaded, which opens up the ability to upload other file types such as raw graphics files or zipped archives. Word documents are limited to 500 KB in size, and PowerPoint presentations are limited to 10MB, but the general limit is still many multiples higher than the maximum Gmail attachment size.

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In addition to launching the latest skirmish in the mobile platform/mobile carrier wars, Google and HTC's Nexus One smartphone also introduced the world to Android 2.1.

Before the Nexus One came out, the Motorola Droid launched in a similar fashion, where the device ran Android 2.0 exclusively before the SDK component was released to the public and other devices were upgraded.

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Social networking site Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and more than 35 million users update their "status" every day. They could be updated with personal information, music, videos, links, or anything that users feel the need to share with their social group.

During 2009, nearly 13 billion of these status updates were posted, and Facebook has released its "Top Status trends of 2009," indicating just what was on people's minds.

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Last week's change to Facebook's privacy policy resulted in tens of thousands of users being directly confronted with a choice over how Facebook should change its stance. The initial result was confusion, but as folks worked out what the question really meant, they came to a discovery that they were not only being asked, but encouraged, to turn off their privacy settings altogether as a benefit to "Everyone" -- Facebook's new default class.

Now, the group that helped focus the US Federal Trade Commission's attention on Google has turned its sights on Facebook, initiating a complaint action yesterday that could lead to a federal investigation of the subject. Expect Congress to follow suit at some point, perhaps calling Facebook executives to the witness stand. In advance of the coming debate, where do you stand on the subject? That's Betanews Live Poll for this Friday.

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With all the recent attention given to Google's Chrome OS, it is only natural that interest in other cloud-based environments should be higher than usual. However, interest in Webtop operating systems still remains relatively low.

Earlier this year, Ray Valdes of Gartner Research said, "From a long-term perspective, I don't see any change to current market trends, which are that Webtop ventures are not gaining market traction."

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