I recorded the session that discussed Google App Engine and the video is below. You can also download all of the “code labs” which are simple tutorials on how to use a variety of Google APIs and services including Google App Engine.

The title provides a short answer to the question: Why do we integrate with Google Apps? An important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-page or to be more accurate the one-browser-tab approach to design – i.e contextual integration of information across applications, so that whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context. In the traditional desktop and client-server world, data is slave to the application that created it. In the cloud, data is liberated so it can contextually go where it is the best fit. We have used this as our architectural blueprint in Zoho, as we integrate Zoho services with each other (such as our CRM & Email integration), as well as in integrating Zoho with third parties.

Take the Google Apps marketplace announcement yesterday. At that event, there were plenty of demonstrations on how contextual integration works across vendors. Notable ones include Intuit Online Payroll integration with Google Calendar, Atlassian Jira.com integration with GMail/Docs/GTalk, and of course our own Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects integration with GMail/Docs. It is fair to say that every single case of integration demonstrated at the launch even yesterday takes the cloud based ecosystem functionality ahead of where traditional enterprise systems are capable of today. Even more important, we completed our integration with Google in under 2 months, even while they were still refining their APIs. We thank the Google team once again for inviting us to be a launch partner.

Why do we want to integrate with Google Apps? The most important browser tab, in a business context, is the one dedicated to email. Given that GMail is the cloud email provider of choice by far, it is natural for Zoho to integrate our suite with GMail and Google Apps. While we agree with Marc Benioff on enterprise apps taking design inspiration from Facebook (well, not too much inspiration, we are not sure we want to go around “poking” our customers!), we would also like to point out that email is where the majority of business users spend their time. Of course, given that Salesforce has no email strategy, it is natural for them to try to redefine the market away from email and towards social networking. This is Salesforce’s third attempt at making their CRM a business app platform, but unfortunately for them, email is a far more natural starting point than CRM – we say that as a company that has a strong CRM suite. Besides, to be a real platform, you have to have a degree of openness, and our experience with Salesforce demonstrates the opposite, and sets up a direct contrast to Google’s platform approach.

Now, what exactly is contextual integration? In a nutshell, contextual integration allows for the most relevant information to surface up to the user, regardless of where that information is stored. For years, if you wanted to get information on customers, you had to go to your CRM system. If you wanted to get information on employees, you had to go to your HRIS system, if you wanted to read email, you went to your email client.

The cloud is going to fundamentally change that. With contextual integration, everything comes together – emails, calendars, documents, CRM systems, project management, HR, accounting, all of it – all from within one single tab. In this new vision, application boundaries become fluid, in fact applications in the traditional sense take the back seat, and the user’s workflow and context dominate. The benefits are enormous, both for individual business users, as well as for IT organizations. Individual users can get more done faster, with tools that get out of their way. IT organizations reap enormous productivity gains in systems integration.

That second point, systems integration, is an important one. The vast majority of IT spending goes to systems integration/professional services. It is well known in the industry that in the old software model, licensing costs represent only 20-30% of the initial cost. But in the SaaS world, we are already seeing how much easier it is to share data among different, disparate systems. This of course, doesn’t mean that system integration costs will entirely go away. In particular, enterprise customers will still need to hire professional services to connect cloud services to their more intricate, legacy systems they still have in-house. While they might not go away, we fully expect them to substantially decrease. Small and Mid-size customers will even be able to do away with them, as cloud vendors are increasingly pre-integrating each other’s systems.

I will acknowledge that contextual integration is still in its infancy, but we (by which I mean the entire cloud ecosystem) are making rapid progress. The important thing to note about cloud applications is that, in the beginning, they were just about replicating the desktop experience. Want an email program? I’ll give you one, but instead of on a desktop client, on the web. That was step one. Step two was about improving some of the features that the desktop application provided: more storage, better scalability, better security, etc. But now cloud applications go far beyond that. Contextual integration is an example of how cloud applications – Zoho’s and everyone else’s – are bringing a whole new wave of productivity and innovation.

Sridhar Vembu is CEO of ZOHO Corp. Learn more about Zoho, a comprehensive suite of award-winning online productivity, collaboration and business applications for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as consumers, at http://www.zoho.com and the Zoho blog, http://blogs.zoho.com/. Follow the company on Twitter at @zoho.

Let’s begin with a simple question — what exactly is Google Buzz? Is it a new type of messageboard/forum? Should a mainstream user be able to compare the user experience to something they already know? Or is this a brand new type of online user experience?

Accessing Google Buzz

When a user agrees to use Buzz, the only link to Buzz appears inside of Gmail on the left menu under their Inbox. Is Buzz a folder like the Inbox, Sent Items and Spam are? No, Buzz is an entire entity – welcome to confusion. Let’s assume Buzz remains inside of Gmail, the link to Buzz needs to be moved away from the folders. Frankly it should become a “module” similar to the chat module. This would also allow for customization and some items could be pulled into that left menu module as well based on user requirements.

ignore the 669 new messages in the inbox, I use Gmail mostly as a newsletter catcher

So I’m In, Now What?

I click on the Buzz link and assuming I have some contacts that are also using Buzz, I should see some content on the page.  I am apparently “following” 65 people which means that any content they share on Buzz will appear on the page. In the image below, you can see that there’s a lot going on.

• First there’s a note that I can read items from RSS/Atom feeds – what’s an Atom feed?
• Some more people are now following me – I can select to follow them back which I think means I will see their updates on my page and I can also block the user
• Then comes the meat of the page. There’s a refresh button which I’m not sure what it actually does since the page updates on its own?
• Next comes what appears to be the beginning of a thread – similar to the very well known experience of using a messageboard/forum

The “thread”

Below is an example of a threaded discussion on Google Buzz. I’ve removed the initial thread message for clarity. We can see that 31 people liked the message including two of my followers plus a bunch of other people.

Now we get into the worst mess of Buzz by far. Look at how sloppy the presentation of the thread is. At least on Friendfeed (you know, the service Google didn’t copy), the usernames are to the right. With the way Buzz is currently organized, the names make it nearly impossible to read a discussion. I want to read from top to bottom and then look to the right (or somewhere else) to see who posted the update.

Some of the popular user’s threads go on for miles with no break. Considering that there is just text with no design, it’s shocking that a company with tens of thousands of employees and a market cap of $172 billion, that they can’t make the flow better.

WTF?

Want to confuse the new user even more? What in the heck is the image below? I can only guess that maybe it’s other messages from Francine? Are they threads Francine started? Are they comments she made? Were they comments on the same topic or another thread?

Topics – who needs topics!

A message board allows you to find content you are interested in based on a topic. When I go my HTMLCenter forums and want to ask a question or learn about SEO, I select that category. When I want to find out about the Holiday Inn points program, I select that forum on FlyerTalk. It makes sense.

On Buzz, I have to put up with every cat photo, baby photo, “i just ran 4 miles in 2 minutes”, “my photo has changed again and I am a bigtime Internet blogger”, “i can’t sleep”, etc. And if you follow the people who are big sharers or big yappers, the stream gets overwhelmed with their content. Apparently Google made a change to muzzle the yappers but does that mean now I don’t see everything? And let’s not even talk about what a new user’s experience looks like when they sign onto buzz and have no content on their page.

I assume Google wants you to use search to find the content you are interested in. But a typical messageboard/forum experience is with browsing, not with search.

Content

It appears that sometimes Buzz pulls in whole blog posts and other times just a link to the actual content. I will address this in another post as it requires additional commentary. My general thought is that Google is doing everything they can to keep you inside of Google.

Summary

Maybe Google isn’t targeting the mainstream user with Google Buzz. In my opinion, Google needs to make Buzz private and only allow the people already in to continue to use the service - the early adopters. I’ve read many messages that note that Google had to rush Buzz out the door – I have no idea why they would do this. To me the experience is a hot mess and is frankly worse than the new user experience on Twitter.

Suggestions for improvement

Later this week I will offer some quick suggestions to try to fix the new user usability problem on Google Buzz. Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments and I will incorporate them (and give you credit) in the suggestions post.

In the very first business plan Gabor showed me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can’t talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.

reBoxed

Even before the first version of reMail was available, Gabor made some good press by creating reboxed. Basically it was just a way to learn about the GMail API along with fetching and displaying emails. But what reBoxed did, was force you to prioritize between two of your GMail contacts. You could select if emails from your boss are more important than emails from your team-leader or girlfriend.

Version 1.x

A month later, on May 11th 2009, version 1.0 of reMail was released. In this first version of reMail, you didn’t download all of your emails to your iPhone. Instead, you paid a monthly fee to reMail and then submitted your email credentials. reMail then connected via IMAP to your email servers, downloaded all your emails to their servers and started indexing them. The search was extremely fast and smart.

reMail Search doesn’t just search the subject, to, and from – it’s full-text search of your email, on your device.

Even better, reMail Search works offline! You can search your email when you’re driving through a tunnel or when you’re in a plane. Our server syncs emails you’re likely to search for on the device, and you can search them even when you’re offline. When you’re offline, you can search your entire email archives – with older search results coming from reMail’s server.

Maybe you already see the problem: you allow reMail to connect and download your emails. Many people wanted a better email search than what Apple had included in the iPhone’s mail application. But handing out credentials is something very sensible. TechCrunch Jason Kincaid noted:

The biggest issue, though, is privacy. ReMail works by sucking in your messages from your IMAP server and hosting them on its own server, which is optimized for rapid searching. Cselle says that the server is secure and that all messages are encrypted, but acknowledges that ReMail does have access to your Email. The company vows never to access or read any of it, unless they are given written permission to do so in the case of a support issue.

Version 2.x

So instead of connecting and indexing the emails on reMail’s servers, the version 2.x of the application (released in August 2009) downloaded all or selected email folders to your iPhone. One of the biggest challenges the team had to overcome was the limited storage space on your iPhone. Hundreds of thousands of emails can easily add up to several Gigabytes of data. But they managed to make it work! And 100,000 emails only needed 500 MB (5.12 KB/email) when downloaded and indexed. The initial price of the iPhone app was $4.99, and was increased to $9.99 after September 1st.

On September 21st reMail for GMail was launched. It allowed you to connect a single GMail account to reMail. The price was $1.99.

The business model of reMail changed on December 14th 2009 once again. Instead of charging for basic features like GMail connectivity, the basic features are now free.

Support for Gmail and Google Mail accounts is included for free. You can purchase IMAP support inside the application,by clicking on “Buy reMail Features”. IMAP support costs $3.99:

In November 2009, reMail announced the availability of a $0.99 reMail version for Rackspace customers.

reMail version 2.11 seems to be the last released version of the application before Google bought the small and smart startup. In an interesting move, somebody has claimed to reverse engineer reMail and release it as open source. Personally I don’t think this is ok, but I can also understand that people seem to depend on reMail and the possibility to search emails very fast and in an easy way.

I really hope Gabor can fulfill his vision of email at his new job at Google.

Editor’s note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness.

If you aren’t familiar with the service, reMail is an email search for the iPhone. reMail was part of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class.

Cselle notes that the reMail iPhone application has been removed from the iPhone App Store and will no longer be available for purchase. He notes, “You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We’ll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we’ve enabled all paid reMail features for you.”

With all of the Gmail Buzz talk as of late and with their team apparently having to work overnight for a few days (the horror!), more product managers will be welcomed to the team.

Update: In the comments, Paul Short makes a smart prediction, “Ah ha! I’ll bet you one cupcake and a subway ticket that reMail ends up as an app on one of those Google phones! (as if it’s not obvious already…).”

I’ll skip over the many good points that have been raised this week within buzz and alongside it. If you are reading this, you have probably read them.

I want simply to make a few observations about the Buzz user experience, some of which are simply unavoidable, and many of which belong to the “conversation” space in general.

Talk is a difficult thing to facilitate using social tools and services. This is because in addition to the content itself, there are contributors, readers, relationships, audiences, social scenes, and public. And talk is a form of social action. A statement alone is communication. A response is action that communicates. Many kinds of actions involving talk exist (greetings to wedding vows), involving varying degrees of sincerity, expectation, commitment, trust, and so on.

I’m simplifying in order to make the point quickly. Gbuzz, and any other tool in which an original post can accrue responses from known and unknown individuals, over time, exposed to audiences depending on the tool’s particular relation to other services, applications, and devices, will have issues of both content and action.

A lot of people talk about the realtime information and information overload. I view this this content as communication. It therefore has information content and relational content. Furthermore, communication is interpreted by recipients/audiences for two intentions: the act of communicating and the content/information communicated.

This fact of interpretation makes the noise all that more noisy. If Gbuzz (and FB status updates, tweets, and other activity updates) were information and information only, I could read each simply for its information value. Because these are communicative acts, however, I read each for its act as for its content.

If the message is an original post, I may consider responding. If the message is a comment, it is already a response, and I may consider my response (or not) in terms of the relationship between the commenter and the original poster. All of this multiplied for all the people I recognize.

Assuming that in Gbuzz and elsewhere I encounter posts by people I know or know of, or have at least selected…. there is ambiguity in each comment or reply made by somebody I don’t know. Again, there will be two types of ambiguity: content and relation. Not knowing the person I may have more difficulty interpreting the commenter’s statement (content/information). Not knowing the relation, I might not know what to make of it, whether to respond, and if, to respond to the person, and/or what s/he said.

If this seems complicated, then I’m making my point. That being that in conversation tools, issues related to meaning are quickly amplified with each case in which ambiguity may exist around an intentional act of communication as well as solicited response or reaction.

I’ll use “post” to cover status updating, tweeting, buzz posting, etc.

I’ll use “comment” to include replies and comments.

In social interaction terms, ambivalence or ambiguity will exist around:

• who the author is
• who the commenter is (involves a relation; and intent)
• what is said (information alone)
• what is said relationally (asked for, solicited, impression made, feeling expressed, etc)
• who it is said to
• who is supposed (hoped) to see it
• who is/not to respond

In audience terms, ambivalence and ambiguity will exist around:

• Who sees it that I know (my followers, contacts, FB friends)?
• Who else sees it that I don’t know (if RT’d, @replied, searched, FB friend of friend, if Gbuzz commenter to poster, etc)?
• Where do I post for best visibility within my social scene?
• Where do I comment to get the author’s attention?
• Whether this is the best place to create conversation with and around that author
• Whether this is the best place to comment to be seen commenting to that author
• Whether this is safe
• Whether this will be surfaced later in search

In terms of attention, temporality, and speed:

• Where do I go for the most recent and up-to-date posts/news
• Where do I go for the most recent and up-to-date responses/commentary
• Which has the most attentive audience relevant to me
• Which keeps posts and comments alive?
• Which is for what’s happening now?
• Where does the person post where they are now/what they are doing now?

Topicality

• Which has the most attentive audience by topic, for this topic?
• Which has the highest quality random commentary?
• Where should I invest effort in becoming a topical expert or authority?
• Where should I solicit responses of a topical kind?

Preservation and durability

• Which service will archive posts?
• Which service will archive comments?
• Which service will archive conversations?
• Which will be searchable?
• Where are users most likely to search?
• Which will have topical organization?
• Which is best to use for reputation building?

I just wanted to break down some of the problems users have expressed with Gbuzz. I’m only just getting started, but will stop here. I hope to have made a couple points clear, however. That talk is a kind of social action in which who we talk to, why, who else is present, and how it appears can all matter as much, or more, than what’s said. And that in tools that facilitate posting original messages, replying or commenting, to or in front of others assembled by means of friending, following, or addressing, some ambiguity will exist around the meaning of what’s said as well as ambivalence around responding.

Some of this confusion will get sorted by Gbuzz developers. Some of it will get handled socially, as each of us finds and practices uses that, in time, others notice. Some will simply persist as residual noise, a byproduct of the fact that when content is separated from action interpretive possibilities are doubled and amplified (what to do?).

It might also be worth noting that at this point in the development of talk technologies and services we have industry competition and incomplete commitment to standards (activity streams). Furthermore, we have little to use that offers meta visualization of notifications. We still have to read everything. I strongly suspect that will change, making it possible for us to browse or skim social conversations for relevant headlines and activity. (Bring on the social searchers and data visualizers!

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7. You can also follow Adrian on Google Buzz and CenterNetworks on Google Buzz.

Most of the people I’ve had discussions with regarding buzz all seem to agree that Google placed Buzz inside of Gmail for the “instant userbase”. One of the reasons that Google Wave has seemed to not grab users interest is that it’s on a separate website which creates a need for Google to market the service to users. By jamming it directly inside of one of the most popular email services, Gmail, they instantly have the userbase that Friendfeed never was able to achieve. Even though many of us have talked about a social network inside of email for years, it still seems a bit odd. Perhaps it will become more familiar over time. Sadly now I need to use Gmail even though I very much prefer Yahoo Mail (except when they don’t deliver my mail for hours or days).

<begin crazy theory mode>

Back in November, Adam Ostrow from Mashable and Caroline McCarthy from Cnet wrote about a partnership between Twitter and Google which would allow Google access to the content on Twitter. McCarthy noted, “Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.”

It appears that Google is paying several million dollars for this data feed. Now that Google has launched Buzz and you can add your public Twitter datastream into Buzz, is there a need for Google to pay for the data feed?

Naturally it’s easy to say that not every Gmail user will use Buzz and those that do may not include their Twitter feeds. But with Gmail having a larger installed userbase than Twitter and with (my speculation) a near 1:1 overlap in users, might the Buzz Twitter stream get Google pretty close to the data feed? In addition, by using the Google Buzz Twitter stream, it gives Google a better way to rank tweets in search results rather than just a person’s Twitter follower counts and simple usage patterns.

In addition, it would allow Google to basically push the search results into Buzz instead of to Twitter.

<end crazy theory mode>

So am I crazy or not?

Well today we learned that another company wants to be Friendfeed. I’d like to welcome you to Google Buzz.

You can read Google Buzz reviews from Alex Wilhelm of NextWeb and Louis Gray.

I’ve been watching the live stream of the Google Buzz event and it looks and functions exactly like Friendfeed except that it’s inside Gmail versus a stand-alone Web application like Friendfeed was/is.

I can only hope that Google Buzz works as smoothly as Friendfeed does and I also hope that Google Buzz pushes out as much as they pull in.

Update: There’s an excellent Google Buzz discussion thread started by Robert Scoble on Friendfeed.

Update 2: During the Q&A session, someone asked about the comparison to Friendfeed and the Google employee (sorry don’t know the name) replied with, ”we dont look at competitors, we just build what our users want”.

Update 3: Many on the Friendfeed chat and several of the questions noted that Google Buzz looks and acts just like Facebook.

If you manage your RSS feeds using Google Reader, adding a webpage feed alert is as simple as adding the webpage to the “add a subscription” option on the left menu. Once you add a webpage, Google will try to find a feed and if they are unsusccessful, you will be prompted to create an alert feed.

The result (a sample is displayed below) isn’t as pretty as a standard RSS feed but works if all you want is an alert when content on the desired page has changed. This could work very well for product pages or to follow price changes for products you are interested in. A few people have noted that this is a good way to keep tabs on your competition.

As a publisher, you can opt-out if you don’t want Google to create feeds using this new service.

The Nexus One phone is currently available in the U.S. for $179 with a new T-Mobile contract (Verizon coming later this year) or $529 unlocked and ready to work anywhere. Of course anywhere really isn’t anywhere – it doesn’t work with Sprint and with AT&T you only get the 56k baud EDGE speed.

All of that aside, the phone and the live demo looked pretty sweet. Much sweeter than the Samsung Ace I am using from the last decade. I’m hoping to upgrade to something more modern at some point this year.

You can read the professional reviews of the phone on a variety of tech blogs. As a deal hunter, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the deal hunters think of the phone. Deal hunters are more like regular people than tech bloggers are (in terms of looks and finances) so it might give us a clue as to how the phone will do beyond the early adopter purchases. Remember too that many people are locked into iPhone 3Gs contracts and won’t be busting out of them to move over to a Nexus One.

The best Nexus One deal hunter thread is on SlickDeals. A couple hundred replies and the overall product has a negative rating of -119. My guess is that most of the negative ratings come from the $529 pricetag. It’s a bit shocking that Google wouldn’t use the traditional pricing of discounted with plan and then unlocked as an option instead of trying to sell the unlocked version first.

Some of the more interesting comments:

• Yeah, it’s sweet, but paying the retail price is NOT a Hot Deal.
• I’ll wait for a refurb.
• Google hasn’t done much to show that this phone is revolutionary or a game changer.
• You pick an iPhone at this point, you’re basically telling the world you’re about 3 years behind the times.
• the demo on their web page shows the ability to make calls via google voice. this seems like a great deal in that case. $520 up front plus $50/month for 5GB data is WAY cheaper than an iPhone. Did it say somewhere that you need a voice plan? What am i missing?
• Ridiculous price for the unlocked version! I hope at that price they collect dust on the shelves so they’ll have to price them down to a reasonable price point.
• seems pricey for an iphone knock-off
• It is waaaaaaaaaay to expensive for an unlock phone, but two THUMBS UP to Google for putting it out to more than one carrier unlike Apple. AT&T sucks crap

The early termination also seems to be higher than other mobile devices:

“You agree to pay Google an equipment subsidy recovery fee (the “Equipment Recovery Fee”) equal to the difference between the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device if you cancel your wireless plan prior to 120 days of continuous wireless service. For example, if the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan was $529 USD and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device was $179 USD with a service plan, the Equipment Recovery Fee you pay will be $350 USD in the event you cancel within the first 120 days of carrier service.”

I look forward to reading reviews from those who bought a Nexus One (and those who received a freebie from Google) about how good the service and the phone is. It does appear that the Android OS might become a real competitor to Apple this year — especially if they can woo developers.

About two years ago, Google discussed QR codes at the Advertising Club meetup in NYC. Shortly thereafter Google announced the Google Print Ads program which included QR codes. Earlier this year Google discontinued the Print Ads product.

If you are new to QR codes, check out our look at how the Japanese use the barcodes today. And also have a look at why I believe QR codes will be big business in the U.S. I wrote this article almost two years ago — I guess finally Google is reading this blog because today they have announced the launch of “Favorite Places” within their local product offering.

Google is sending out 100,000 stickers to the most often searched local businesses across the U.S. These stickers will include a QR code that can be scanned with a mobile phone. After scanning the QR code, information about the local establishment including hours of operation, menus, reviews, payment methods, etc. will be sent directly to the phone.

Users will be able to “star” their favorite places after scanning the codes and will also be allowed to write reviews.

With more of the new mobile devices having the QR code software pre-installed, I am sure this program will take off for Google. I wonder what will happen to Microsoft Tag and if Yelp (or the new local location services) will make a play in this area.

And just wait until all of us humans walk around with QR tatoos so that an interested mate can scan our code on our arm and learn all about us :)

What Google DNS will do is basically sit between your computer and the computer you want to reach. When we type in “moo.com”, a computer has to translate that to computer-speak and then send us on our way to the computer that holds the moo.com files. This middle-man computer is called a DNS 0r domain name server.

Google says they can do DNS faster than anyone else and that since we all want to load webpages very fast, people will want to switch.

Jesse Stay says that DNS will become the new browser war and compares today’s announcement to the fight between Netscape and Microsoft. Steve Rubel says that the Google DNS is all about ads. You might be wondering why Steve says that this is an ad-play. It’s simple. Using my example above with moo.com, let’s say you accidentally type in “moopiet29595.com”. Since there is no website at that address, the DNS server is lost out there in cyberspace. When that happens, most DNS servers will reroute you to a page that typically is a search page with search results that match the name you typed in plus ads.

OpenDNS, the popular DNS service, has a post that discusses the Google DNS launch. It’s worth a read.

Based on today’s announcement, here are my top two predictions for 2010 with regards to DNS.

Google Will Own ISP DNS

It’s simple – most Internet providers will outsource their DNS functions to Google. I predict that this will happen by the end of June 2010. Google has the cash and will make it super sweet for the ISPs to switch. This will also help Google take the main market share for DNS. Changing your DNS servers on your computer is not that easy and most Internet users will never do it. But if Google partners with say Comcast or Time Warner, they can make the change at the server level and it will be done automatically. The ISPs get major cash, Google gets the overwhelming share of the DNS function and users never know anything changed.

For years I thought Google would acquire the big ISPs. Now they have no need to – just take over the DNS and they get control without having to deal with the other ISP operations (e.g. billing, customer service, etc.)

Microsoft Will Acquire OpenDNS

If we go with Jesse’s argument above that DNS will be the warzone for position next year, Microsoft will want a hand in the pot. OpenDNS won’t be able to resist the bucket of cash that Microsoft will bring. At that point, Microsoft will go after the partnerships I noted above that Google will most likely make. And Jesse will be right – it will be a bloodbath.

I can’t tell you whether to switch to Google DNS or not. The bottom line is that Google knows just about everything you do online already. So much so that in the promo for a show tonight on CNBC where Maria Bartiromo will interview Google employees, the only promo they are airing features Maria saying “just how much does Google know about me?”

Is today’s announcement a bad thing — I can’t answer that question but my guess is that once the government gets past the health care issues, they may just come knocking. Google has nothing to worry about for now though because the health care debate will take us into 2014. I’d love to get a reaction from the President’s CTO and tech team.

If you decide to setup Google DNS, Amit has a great post with videos on how to make the switch. And if you decide to switch, leave a comment with your reasoning for switching.

Found via Mr. K, Google has announced the launch of a new tool to track how Google views your website, ecommerce site or blog from a loading perspective. The tool is available within the Google Labs section of the Google Webmaster Tools service. The tool is called “Site Performance” and actually displays some interesting information.

Google notes, “Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.”

The tool shows you how long it takes Google to load your pages and includes the details on total size, number of requests and domain lookups.

As the announcement post notes, the tool also shows you example pages and edits you could make to have the page load faster. In my tests, it says I should:

• combine CSS
• reduce domain lookups
• Enable gzip compression
• serve resources from a consistent URL

Give the tool a try and leave a comment with the suggestions the Site Performance tool suggests for your website.

Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with “subscription” within Google News.

If you don’t know what fair use is, there are four factors that courts look at to see if an otherwise infringing use of one’s copyright is “fair” and therefore non-infringing:

1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

For more, this Stanford guide is a good start — indeed, the bullets above are a direct copy from there — but if you can handle some legalese, you are best off reading a case.  I recommend Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books (”RDR“, for short), for two reasons: (1) it’s about Harry Potter and (2) it shows that fair use is not at all intuitive.  The case doesn’t apply here but it’s easier to slough through than most cases.

Anyway: The fair use analysis.  I am going to skip the second factor because I think it’s basically irrelevant in this case.

Factor 1:  Is Google’s use transformative?

Yes, generally.  NewsCorp provides the content to report the news.  Google uses the content to provide a research tool.

While Google would almost certainly agree to not index NewsCorp content irrespective of the legal question, I wonder if NewsCorp could force the issue legally.  The answer: Probably not.  Crawling and indexing is transfomative: the search service (Google, Google News, etc.) is a research tool.  This article about litigation over Google’s Image Search explains more, and the analogy should hold.  In that case, Google argued that it provides the image thumbnails in order to allow it to act as an effective research tool.  The court noted that Google isn’t providing the full-size image, but rather, just enough for the searcher to see if they’re on the right track and click through.

If Google provided access to the full text instead of the synopsis, it seems that they’d be hard-pressed to claim they are providing a research tool  This factor would be in play and likely tilt toward NewsCorp.

Factor 3: Is the amount and substantiality of the content “too much”?

Let’s look at academic papers and their research tools; specifically, PubMed.  Check out this search result for “food protein induced enterocolitis syndrome” and you’ll see it’s a mere syllabus.  It’s substantial enough to meet the needs of the researcher, and the amount — well, the copyright holder wrote the passage so that researches can find the paper.   It’d be hard for the author to argue that using this is “too much,” but it’d also be hard for the research tool provider to argue that this is not enough.

The parallel to preview pages, written by the publisher (NewsCorp, for example) for the benefit of the researcher, is stark.  If NewsCorp provides these pages to Google (and the pages are indeed adequate to meet the researchers’ needs), Google would be very hard pressed to make a fair use argument for indexing the content behind the paywall.

Factor 4: What is the effect of Google’s use on the potential market for NewsCorp’s content?

Seems like an easy one. If Google indexes the preview page, the effect is minimal at worst. If Google indexes the article itself (and provides it for free), different story.  NewsCorp is drawing a line, albeit maybe one in the sand, saying that there’s a paid-for market for their complete content.  If Google crosses that line, the factor tilts into NewsCorp’s factor, quickly.

So, I think that at the end of the day, Google is doing what it has to do, not what it necessarily wants to.

Originally from Dan Lewis’ blog

Google notes that the acquisition could help with their OCR scanning projects for Google Books and the Google News archive search. From the acquisition announcement, “Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”

Apparently ReCaptcha powers the human verfication for over 100,000 websites. We use the service on our job posting form.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has more on the acquisition and what it could mean for Google Books. Additional coverage on Google Blogoscoped.

Google shares are up nearly 2% today (I doubt this acquisition has anything to do with the increase).

Update: Andrew Parker has more information about the founder of ReCaptcha, Luis von Ahn. Parker notes that this is the second acquisition by Google of a technology founded by von Ahn.