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.

• Gmail – takes me right into my mailbox with no login screen
• Google Checkout – forces me to enter my password each time but displays my username
• Feedburner – takes me directly into the my main list of managed feeds
• Google AdSense – displays a login page but the login box is missing and a “waiting” note and then I am taken directly into my account
• Google AdWords – takes me directly to my management screen
• Google Webmaster – displays a similar screen to Google AdSense but I am forced to click the login button but am never prompted for a password
• iGoogle – takes me directly to my customized home page
• YouTube - clicking upload takes me directly to the upload screen
• Google Reader – takes me directly to my RSS feeds
• Orkut - takes me directly to my account management page
• Google Groups – takes me to my groups management page
• Google Docs – takes me directly to my documents management page
• Google Calendar – takes me directly to my calendar
• Blogger – forces me to login using my Google account information

At first I was thinking that it’s great that Google forces me to enter my password when I want to process orders for my startup in Google Checkout. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t Google AdSense follow the same authentication pattern? What about Google Docs and Calendar – documents in both of those services could be just as sensitive as financial information in Google Checkout/AdSense or AdWords.

Earlier this week we had over 1,500 comments on our Gmail down post. Many of the comments (and in emails I received) noted how many confidential and important documents are held in user’s Gmail accounts.

My question to ya’all and to Google is simple – why not follow the same procedures for all Google services? Or perhaps the better option is to allow users to select what level of authentication they would like for each service. Either way, I’d like to see some consistency based on the “security level” of each application.

I use Yahoo Mail for the majority of my email although today I decided to send emails about apartments using my Gmail account. I guess I will be homeless if Google doesn’t get it working soon! :-P

Update: 5:00 PM Eastern – Google has provided an update on their blog about the service outage. They say that the team is working on the issue but there are no details on the cause or expected recovery time.

The following message is displayed on some loads:

Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.

As always, please report in if Gmail is down where you are.

While you wait for Gmail to return to service, check out all the ways Google tracks you online.

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.!

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.

Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now – as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight. Please note that this has nothing to do with the technology: as I said before, I happen to agree that Silverlight is a great piece of technology.

What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE. IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX – but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as “online Wordpad”, as Bill Gates put it.

That brings us back to Google: today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Zoho are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us. Could Google abuse its position? Well, I am sure they understand karma!

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.

Exhibit #1 – Outlook

Exhibit #2 – Google Wave

Exhibit #3 – Microsoft Outlook with Xobni

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.

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.

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.

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.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

Twitter

I posted some issues I had (am having) with my Twitter account for my startup. I still have not received any sort of reply from Twitter staff to my post or my trouble ticket in their system. I asked Twitter investor Fred Wilson for an update and he told me to go to Get Satisfaction as "some users seem to like it".

Amazon

I had an issue with Amazon Web Services and after clicking help, I posted a message to their customer service form. About 24 hours later I received a very generic reply that the person was going to have to investigate my issue further but he did note that I can’t reply to that email. So that left me with nowhere to turn as the days clicked by without a resolution.

After multiple days I turned to my friends and asked for help. I was able to chat with an Amazon executive (who actually helped me on the weekend while he was on a business trip!) and he got the case moving. I can say that the issue has been resolved to my satisfaction. I would suggest that Amazon look at how they handle support emails on the web services side – it’s a bit odd to me to have such poor email customer service on the web services side when the product side (normal amazon.com) has always worked so well.

Update: one note, the email from the support person who resolved the issue also comes from a no-reply mailbox. I have a follow up question regarding how to handle part of the problem and now I am back to square 1.

Google

I realized about two weeks ago that I never received a required form from Google AdSense. I headed over to the support section for Google AdSense and was promptly told that there is only "limited" email support for Google AdSense. I honestly have no idea what limited means but I learned that I will never know. No matter what I tried, I was never able to reach an email form to even ask for help – all I got was the run-around inside Google’s supposed help section.

After a friend provided me with an email address for a person in the AdSense team, I sent off an email and received a reply pretty quickly stating that I would get a followup from someone who could help me. It has now been 10 days without a response.

Summary

I do wonder (especially on Twitter) if the so-called celebrities receive actual support when needed. Does Shaq or Britney have a hotline for support when or if there’s a request?

If you read CN you know that I put customer service at the top of the list when it comes to a product or service. One of the first posts on CN was a web apps customer service face-off (Dogster received the only A grade). It’s certainly disappointing that it seems like to get any sort of help from the companies I’ve listed you need to know someone.

The announcement blog post is worth a read – apparently the video ad units were U.S. only and many publishers believe the reason they failed is because Google didn’t provide any guidance on usage. WebProNews has additional thoughts on the closure. If I remember, we tried the video ad units on HTMLCenter but they never produced any real income so we removed them.

Once the closure is final at the end of April, the ad units will be replaced with YouTube banners and/or YouTube video boxes. Arlene suggests you swap out any video ad units with traditional AdSense units.

On another AdSense topic, I learned this weekend that Google has no actual support for their publishers. I don’t believe I was issued a tax form for last year and attempted to contact Google for help. All you get is a form that takes you round and round and a note that they provide "limited email support" – not sure what "limited" means but at least from what I can tell it means "none". Too bad there isn’t a Matt Cutts for AdSense.

Andy Beal has a good overview of the changes which he calls, "worse, worser and even worser". Here is the new fee tier structure based on monthly sales:

• less than $3,000 – 2.9% + $0.30
• $3,000 – $9,999.99 – 2.5% + $0.30
• $10,000 – $99,999.99 – 2.2% + $0.30
• $100,000 or more – 1.9% + $0.30

To give you an idea, as of today, here’s what you pay: 2% + $0.20 per transaction. While Google makes out that customers may see a decrease, I doubt the percentage is that high for customers with over $100,000 a month in sales.

The other news is that the fee credit provided by purchasing AdWords is also going to be removed. When I signed up for Google Checkout last month, I was pleasantly surprised to see the fee credit. It’s certainly disappointing to see the credit removed – wonder how that will impact AdWords sales which in turn will affect AdSense publishers.

Also, if your customer is located in another country, you will need to tack on another 1% fee on the purchase amount.

Update: Rich has a good overview of the changes from a UK perspective.

Steve talks about feed monetization, rss subscriber count accuracy, stats integration with Google Analytics, email tracking, speed of feed updates, feed flare updates, size of FeedBurner team, ad formats and Steve’s feed predictions for 2009.

In the interview Steve notes that most publishers are earning more with the new AdSense for Feeds product. I would strongly disagree both from my own sites and from other publishers I’ve spoken with. When I met with the FB team, they said that their ad team was good at selling tech ads. I would agree with that statement because they had top of the line advertisers paying good rates. Also remember that the FeedBurner ad program was mostly (or exclusively I forget) a CPM model; the AdSense model is CPC which makes a difference in total earnings.

It’s also interesting that Steve notes that the team they have working on FeedBurner come in and out at "various times". As for the pinging and updates, again, I’ve been able to get the CN feed to update instantly with no issues.

I look forward to seeing how Steve and his team can get FeedBurner moving towards progress as both a service and a publisher monetization option in early 2009.