Cloud

Today, Google launched a new project called Sidewiki, which is a browser sidebar that lets users add footnotes to any existing Web page, even if the main site doesn't allow comments. Sidewiki has been added as a feature on Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and the team today said they're working on an edition for Chrome, too.

Sidewiki appears as a field on the left hand side of the browser, where users can post contextual commentary. If it's a site paraphrasing a piece of literature and a user happens to have a link to the full text, it can be added there. While it can very easily suffer from "FIRST!" syndrome or serve as a spam advertisement platform, posts are not anonymous. And as Sundar Pichai, VP of Google Product Management and Michal Cierniak, Engineering Lead for Google Sidewiki today said the content will be ranked by quality.

You can't fault any service for not being capable of providing 100% uptime; but you also can't help but notice the shockwaves when that one-tenth-of-one-percent comes around. This morning, Google is acknowledging that users throughout yesterday had difficulty accessing its Google News server, although it is not calling the event an outright outage.

News publishers whose promotional models rely upon Google News received notices from Google yesterday afternoon saying that users began having access difficulties at about 12:30 pm PDT (3:30 EDT) yesterday. Betanews is capable of tracking its own readership, along with referral sources, on a minute-to-minute basis; and we could actually see the event as though we were watching a seismometer. Assuming our instrumentation is accurate, our traffic from Google News began plummeting almost three hours earlier than this report, at about 1:00 pm EDT. Referral traffic from Google News began resuming its normal pattern at about 5:30.

One of the more startling announcements we've received from Microsoft since the first word that Office will support OpenDocument Format as an alternative default, was last week's news that access to its forthcoming Office Live Apps would be open to all users for free. We're being told again and again that there's no catch, no asterisk with small print behind it, that Microsoft is perfectly happy to let everyone edit Office documents online for free.

But does the Technical Preview give any indication that these Web apps are ready for prime time? For Microsoft to make its case against Google, Zoho, and others that produce free-for-general-use Web apps (although Google Apps' continued free state has become debatable of late), it has to demonstrate that it can carry not just the look-and-feel, but also the functionality and reliability, of traditional Office applications into the Web apps space. This is especially true if Microsoft truly does have a plan to earn revenue indirectly from the product, whether through advertising or commercial derivative services.

The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned "lifecasting" service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.

According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:

Three laptop computers, all of them cool-looking, all with well-respected brands, all have the features you want, all sell for the same price. This isn't going to be a toy for you; it will be, for at least the next few years, the engine for your work and your livelihood. How do you make a purchasing decision? You check online to see which one is the better performer, and which one other customers prefer.

Five Web browsers, all of them cool-looking, all with well-respected brands, all have the features you want, all of them...are free. But this isn't going to be a newspaper reader or a Twitter feed carrier for you; it will be, for at least the next few weeks, the engine for your work and your productivity. Sure, you'll install all of them. But which one will you install as your default, and which one will you trust with your everyday applications?

After several months of intense research, helped along by literally hundreds of reader suggestions, Betanews has revised and updated its testing suite for Windows-based Web browser performance. The result is the Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI). If it's "creepy" to you, that's fine.

We've kept one very important element of our testing from the very beginning: We take a slow Web browser that you might not be using much anymore, and we pick on its sorry self as our test subject. We base our index on the assessed speed of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista SP2 -- the slowest browser still in common use. For every test in the suite, we give IE7 a 1.0 score. Then we combine the test scores to derive a CRPI index number that, in our estimate, best represents the relative performance of each browser compared to IE7. So for example, if a browser gets a score of 6.5, we believe that once you take every important factor into account, that browser provides 650% the performance of IE7.

The problem with sleeping giants in recent years is that "terrible resolve" hasn't necessarily gotten them very far. Of course, this applies outside the information technology industry as well. But not even the Internet -- the biggest revolutionary IT technology since the personal computer -- is creditable to any one major player or allied force. Historians will note that almost every company or group to attain success through the Internet did so either 1) completely by accident, and/or 2) without any substantive plan as to what to do with that success once it attained it.

But the last great "sleeping giant" episode in the history of the IT industry was one of absolute, intentional, and steadfast resolve. The landscape of our lives and work has been shaped by this chain of events. It was triggered by WordPerfect, and the terrible resolve was manifest in Microsoft Office. I watched from very close range as, within a span of mere months, the axis powers that commanded respect and even awe -- WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, and Harvard Graphics -- deflated to mere also-ran status. Their manufacturers, in an often comical display of poor timing and miscommunication, self-destructed.
As a result today, when you ask businesses worldwide why they use Microsoft Office, the majority of responses you'll get say it's because it's the productivity suite for Windows. And when you ask those same businesses why they use Windows, the answer is because it's the operating system that runs Office.

This afternoon, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company is now beginning the process of notifying selected participants that they have been accepted for inclusion in the company's Technical Preview program for Office Web Apps. But in another huge example of burying the lead, a blog post that went live minutes ago from Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall states that the complete Web Apps suite, once officially released, will be "available" to all Windows Live users.

As the spokesperson confirmed to Betanews, Hall's implication is accurate: Everyday users of Windows Live services (which are already free) and who have SkyDrive storage on those services (the first 25 GB of which are free) will have the entire suite available for use from any modern Web browser. A video released today showed Excel Web App (that's the formal name for it now) running on a Mozilla Firefox 3.5 browser, and on a Windows 7 platform. We're still awaiting word on non-Windows browsers.

Today's launch by Google of a beta service of something it's calling Fast Flip fits the profile for what could become the company's bid to republish and redistribute most of the world's online news content, in a manner which claims to benefit the publisher. My partner Tim Conneally took a look at the mobile version of Fast Flip earlier today.

At a book festival last April, Google CEO Eric Schmidt let loose another interesting fact about its business plans: He told Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman of The Wrap that his company was working on a new and advanced news search algorithm, that would automatically serve users the topics and news providers they're interested in, based on its assessment of what the reader has pulled up in the past -- "to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they're looking for it," Waxman wrote.

In just over a year's time, Facebook has doubled its user base. Now, the social networking site now has more than 300 million users the company said at TechCrunch50 today. And with that size increase comes the company's first cash profit, which it also announced today.

Facebook has been a profitable business for nearly a year, but it didn't expect to start pulling in a cash surplus until 2010 due to investments and acquisitions.

Call me crazy, but aren't Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the "Mobile Web" that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?

I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a "desktop browser" engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can't help but feel that an "application" designed specifically for a mobile phone's browser is the same thing as a Web site stripped down to mobile phone size and speed.

Last week, in what was probably an intentional promotional ploy, Microsoft showed off to some of its 40,000 employees and close colleagues, during an employee rally at Seattle's Safeco Field, some features of what it was touting as "Bing 2.0," with a warning that users everywhere could start to see these features go live as soon as today. While there is no official word of a "Bing 2.0" launch, one new feature has gone live today, and not quietly -- its curtain was officially raised during a ceremony at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today.

Visual Search is being described as a way to search for items by sight instead of by text. Shoppers will be able to locate digital cameras, for example, says Microsoft, by way of "an engaging visual experience without having to sort through page after page of links."

A typical publishing business requires a business model before it can establish the type of service that can generate an audience. By anyone's standards, Twitter has never been a typical publisher. Venture capitalist Jason Calcanis -- who offered to pay a quarter million dollars for prominent placement on Twitter -- has been on record throughout last year and up until last May as saying a real online business must first build an "audience of scale" -- something on the order of 10 million unique users -- before it can actually start building a business model for monetizing the strength of that audience.

Well, Twitter is probably there now, but the first signs of what kind of monetization we're likely to see for it appears to be more categorical than architectural. As its first true sign to the world that it's "going that way," the publisher unveiled its new Terms of Service late this week, with a new and vague paragraph asserting its rights to place ads somewhere within the service, at some time.

YouTube UK has lifted the six-month long "premium" music video blackout after arriving at a deal with the Performing Rights Society for Music over royalties.

The description of "premium" music videos included those that have been uploaded, or claimed as property, by record labels. The blackout only prohibited UK YouTube viewers from watching these videos, fan-uploaded copies were not included in the sanction.

Will this week's Google Mail outage frighten you out of shifting more of your computing solutions into the cloud?

On balance, it shouldn't, as no technology is perfect and failure is part of the landscape whether we keep our stuff in a data center, in a box under our desk, or on some unseen Web server on the other side of the country. But any failure of this magnitude offers up a prime opportunity to discuss -- and hopefully improve -- the weaknesses that can still bite us.