Google Archive

Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google - could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

The post below was originally posted on the Zoho blog and is authored by Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement.

It is easy to dismiss all this with “Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft,” but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google’s innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight?

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let’s recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft’s commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome …), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple’s resurgence - based on design prowess, not platform dominance - and Vista’s failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.

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Yesterday for a brief moment, lots of tech bloggers removed the twitter auto-post function and replaced it with excitement over the Google Wave announcement. I’ve read posts that say Google Wave will replace the Web as we know it and then I read posts that say nearly the opposite. I am just wondering, did anyone else immediately think that Google Wave looks nearly identical to Microsoft Outlook?

For reference, the main blue color in Outlook is #e3efff and in Google Wave the main blue color is #c9e2fc. Google Wave has pretty pictures too. I think if you add the Xobni plugin into Outlook, the screenshots get even closer.
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This seems to have been a tough week for Google and their servers. Twice this past week Google News was down. Google noted that the issues apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. Now I’ve been noticing for a while now that YouTube isn’t acting correctly. Many pages don’t load, videos are displaying an error message and the search function provides the error message displayed below.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.

Staffing solutions provider Jobscience has announced the launch of Jobscience for Google Apps today. The new service combines Google Apps and a custom recruiting application built on the Salesforce Force.com platform. What a change from the old days of trying to integrate Resumix with a job web site.

Interestingly they push you to use Blogger for the company job blog. They quickly note that the job blog offers RSS so you can share the jobs anywhere. The company describes the service as, “…allows small to medium size companies to publicly broadcast jobs, accept online applications, and utilize Google Docs to manage resumes and other recruitment-related documents.”

A site license is $100/month and works with any level of Salesforce account. The company created a demo video which is a walkthrough of the steps to get the application running.

Yesterday we were the first to report on the Google News outage in the AM hours on the East Coast. This morning it appears that Google News is down again.

It looks like the outage started about 9am Eastern. As of 9:30am, I am still receiving the error message seen on the right. Please report in if Google News is down where you are.

Yesterday’s issue apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. After Google News came back to life yesterday, an announcement was posted about a new design for Google News.

Check Twitter search for additional commentary on the Google News outage.

Update 9:37 Eastern - appears Google News is running once again.

Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage started approximately 8:40AM Eastern and continues at the time of this posting 8:47AM Eastern.

Please report in if Google News is down where you are. We have received reports that the Russian Google News is functioning correctly.

Check Twitter search for additional commentary on the Google News outage.

Update: after some pinging and a whole lot of tracerouting, it appears some datacenters might be down but not the entire Google News service as some are getting in and I get in on some loads (about 3 out of 10)

Update 2: 9:30AM Eastern - Google News still appears to be inconsistently down - as CN commenters have noted it’s down more than it is up. I am still getting the 503 error.