This is the first part of a multi-part article series. During the series our main priority is searching for the definition of Google. It s not an easy endeavor since Google is more than just a renowned search engine. We re going to cover many of its services desktop applications and web platforms. And then we ll discuss how Google affects our lives ... Outsourcing Software Development? Regain lost visibility into your projects. Spot problems before they affect delivery and budget.

E-mail is one of the oldest functions of the Internet. Originally used by scientists and scholars to collaborate on projects its popularity grew and with the advent of the World Wide Web practically everybody online now has an email address and many users have several. Now Google and Yahoo want to change e-mail to make it more like a social network.... Get your FREE 30 day VMware Workstation trial Now! Virtualize your desktop today with VMware Workstation.

Mozilla has released a beta version of Firefox 3.0, moving its next-generation browser one step closer to general release.Close to 75,000 developers have been testing early "alpha" versions of Firefox 3.0 code for several months now, but this first beta release of the code, unveiled Tuesday, should open up the software to a much larger group of testers, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "The move from alpha to beta typically means that we've hit a point of quality where we believe the browser is usable as a daily browser," he said. "For us, it's a step up in terms of getting closer toward the final release."Schroepfer expects a second beta to follow by year's end, followed by a final beta 3 update in early 2008. By the time the finished product is unveiled, sometime in 2008, the team hopes to have close to half a million users testing its software.One of the big changes with Firefox 3.0 is an overhaul of the way the browser bookmarks and keeps track of browsing history. With this new feature, called Places, browsing history will now be stored in a database, meaning that it will be much easier for Firefox users to search for sites they've visited. "Because of the new Places infrastructure, we're able to store a much larger component of your history," Schroepfer said.And the browser will now be able to search what is being typed into the address bar to see if it's relevant to previous Web visits. For example, someone who had recently visited a Web page entitled "Review of 2008 Toyota Prius," could type "Prius" into the address bar and would be directed to the review page.Security has also taken a front seat with Firefox 3.0.The browser is now integrated with Google's database of known malicious Web sites and will warn users before they visit sites that are considered to be dangerous.And Firefox's download manager is now better integrated with anti-virus software, making it easier to spot malicious files before they are placed on the desktop. The browser will no longer allow add-ons to be downloaded from insecure sites, mending a practice that could have serious security ramifications, according to some.Much of the hardest work has been under the hood, however. Firefox sports a new HTML rendering engine, called Gecko 1.9, that will make it perform better in the graphically rich Web 2.0 world, where developers are trying to find new ways of running software whether the PC is connected to the Internet or not. "You won't see those as a user right away," Schroepfer said. "But you'll see Web applications do more interesting things and run more quickly in Firefox over time."

Google is getting closer and closer to offering a full blown operating system (if it hasn’t already) with its suite of desktop and office services, the Google bundling in the gPC (maybe Google PC) and Google’s Android Open Handset Alliance for mobile phone OS. Even if there is not an official Google OS, the pairing [...]

Google took a giant step on Friday to make it easier for companies to migrate any e-mail system over to Google Apps Gmail by offering an E-mail Migration API targeted at corporate developers and e-mail administrators."We've provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop," said Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.Previously, Google released an IMAP migration tool that allowed end-users and administrators to migrate from most IMAP-based e-mail systems to Google Gmail.The new migration tool will move e-mail from any system, including Microsoft Outlook calendars, e-mail, and contacts into Google Apps, or any other type of mail server to Premier, Education, or Partner editions of Google Apps."Migration is a difficult problem with many edge cases," said Cohen, adding that Google has now exposed enough functionality that, in theory, any migration scenario into Google Apps is possible.In releasing the new API, Google appears to understand that any mid- or large-sized company would be reluctant to rip and replace its current e-mail server with another system. However, by allowing a company to run both systems concurrently, Google may have ameliorated a major concern.Companies like Capgemini, with 80,000 employees are in fact putting a first toe in the water and using Google Apps for some of its employees.Google Apps E-mail Migration API is available now.

IBM said it plans to release new products next year that will allow organizations to make wider and more efficient use of the computing resources in their datacenters.The idea is to make the resources available in a virtual "computing cloud" so they can be accessed wherever they are needed. That could mean on a distant server running an e-commerce application during a busy shopping season, or on a desktop in a laboratory that's trying to run a compute-intensive science application.The challenge with such computing has been the complexity in managing such a widely distributed architecture. IBM announced Thursday it will offer new products, based partly on existing open-source software, to simplify tasks like ensuring security, data privacy and reliability, and getting high rates of system utilization.IBM is calling the initiative Blue Cloud, and compared its significance to its decision several years ago to throw its weight behind Linux, which helped the open-source OS become more widely accepted by corporations. The new effort stems from technologies developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center, and IBM said 200 of its researchers have been working on the project.Blue Cloud is based partly on the open-source Xen and PowerVM virtualization technologies, and an open-source work scheduling software called Hadoop, which beaks big computing jobs into component tasks and distributes them across multiple computers, reallocating work when a server fails. IBM said it will package the technologies with its own Tivoli systems management software and consulting services.The first Blue Cloud products will be released in the second quarter next year, for servers based on x86 and IBM Power processors. The company will follow with products for its System z mainframes, also next year, and eventually offer cloud products for highly dense rack-server clusters.Cloud computing is an extension to existing efforts around grid and clustered computing, which have also been pursued by other vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft. IBM said the "special sauce" it will bring to the problem is software that lets the computing cloud "self-manage and self-heal itself."The initiative also builds on IBM's announcement with Google last month that they are developing cloud computing environments for academic use. But today's announcement is aimed more widely at corporations and government users that want the "extreme scale" made possibly by lashing together pools of computers.IBM offered examples that it said could benefit from cloud computing, including social networking or mobile commerce applications that support very high numbers of users; graphics-intensive medical research applications; or data-intensive mapping applications used by governments to respond to natural disasters like wildfires and earthquakes.The company said it was already working on some projects with a few governments and businesses, including the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology.

When Jeneane Sessum logged into her Gmail account on the afternoon of Oct. 27, she was greeted with a horrifying sight: an empty inbox.A Gmail user since 2004, Sessum, a social media consultant and writer in Atlanta, had thousands of messages there, enough to use up almost 30 percent of her allotted storage space.Because Gmail is her primary work and personal e-mail service, Sessum lost many important messages, including some she needed at that moment for a project.Days earlier in Chicago, Jessica Squazzo, a writer and editor, accessed Gmail and stared at her computer screen in disbelief: All messages from 2007 had disappeared from her inbox.Sessum and Squazzo are just two of a small but steady stream of Gmail users who regularly report losing some, many, or all of their messages without a clue as to why.It seems that hardly a week goes by without at least several users reporting this problem on discussion boards, such as the official Gmail Help forum.Asked to comment about multiple lost-message reports in 11 different threads created in September and October in the Gmail Help forum, a Google spokesman declined to address any of the specific situations, citing privacy reasons.However, he did emphasize that, as far as Google is concerned, "most issues like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords -- or sometimes simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam -- not a data corruption issue."That explanation makes little sense to savvy and experienced Internet users like Sessum and Squazzo, who are aware of phishing scams and know better than to reply to suspicious messages -- let alone include in them confidential, sensitive information, such as passwords. In addition, they say they are the only ones with access to their respective accounts.Moreover, both Sessum and Squazzo, interviewed separately, question why a malicious hacker would go through the trouble of trying to access someone's e-mail account in order to delete messages, instead of acting stealthily to harvest information they could exploit like credit card numbers."If someone had hacked into my account, why would they have just erased some of my e-mail and not all? The fact that precisely all my e-mail from 2007 -- and no earlier mail -- was wiped out leads me to still conclude that it must have been some technical error on Gmail's servers, whether they want to admit that or not," said Squazzo, who has used Gmail for personal communications since 2005.In the case of Sessum, while the inbox was empty, she still had copies of messages she had sent in the "All Mail" file of her account, along with saved transcripts of instant messaging chats she had conducted using Google Talk.For the sake of comparison, a review of discussion forums for users of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail reveals far fewer reports of lost or disappearing inbox messages than for Gmail, even though those rival services have larger user bases.Matt Cain, a Gartner vice president and lead e-mail analyst, hasn't investigated reports of lost messages in Gmail but said the problem hasn't been observed as a common one in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, both of which have traditionally enjoyed a high degree of data integrity in their message repositories."I can't validate [that this is a problem with Gmail] but if it's true, it's coming at an unfortunate time for Google because the company is aggressively pushing into the enterprise e-mail space," Cain said, referring to the Gmail component of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication application suite, designed for organizations of all sizes, including large ones with its Premier edition.A review of the Gmail Help forum reveals that reports of lost messages have become more common in the past year with a higher volume of complaints occurring since July.Another user who encountered this problem was Gary S. Moore of Fort Worth, Texas, who had used Gmail without problems for two years until one day last month, when he noticed all his archived messages had vanished from his account, including more than 100 photos.In Greenwood, Missouri, Monroe Johnson was also affected, when a portion of his stored messages disappeared in October. Johnson, like Sessum and Squazzo, doesn't believe an error on his part or a compromised account might be to blame."I doubt it. I have been working with computers since 1997," Johnson said. He's the only one who has access to his account, he said.Like other interviewed users who contacted Google seeking help and technical support, Sessum only received a canned reply saying Google had determined that her problem wasn't due to a technical issue with Google systems and that she should change her Gmail password."I guess they are insinuating someone bothered to break into my Gmail account with the express purpose of deleting my incoming mail while deciding to leave my chats and sent mail. Not likely," she said.Sessum, who also uses the hosted Google Docs applications and other Google services, expected a more helpful answer from the company, considering the extent of her data loss."In many respects, I'm building my small business on the back of Google. And I believe that's what Google wants us to do. So it's imperative that they provide at least a little support when something goes wrong," said Sessum, who hosts her blog on Google's Blogger service.Although consumer Webmail services such as Gmail are generally free, the user expectation is that the data stored in them will not be corrupted, Gartner's Cain said.In fact, one of Gmail's innovations when it was introduced in April 2004 was the size of its inbox -- 1GB, huge by the standards at that time -- so that users wouldn't have to bother deleting messages if they didn't want to.Google didn't deliver POP3 support for Gmail until November 2004 and didn't offer IMAP support until late last month. POP3 and IMAP are protocols that let users download e-mail messages from servers to desktop PC software.There doesn't seem to be a pattern to the reports of lost Gmail messages as the problem has hit users with a variety of PCs, operating systems, and browsers, according to interviews and discussion forum messages.For example, Sessum uses a Mac computer and the Firefox browser and doesn't synchronize her Gmail account with a desktop e-mail software. Meanwhile, Johnson accesses Gmail from a Windows Vista PC and downloads the messages to his computer, although he keeps copies of them on the Google servers.Sessum, echoing other users, is hoping Google will look deeper into this problem of disappearing e-mail messages. Its users deserve a better explanation, she said."Google's back-end support function is MIA. You can't find a number to call. You have to tap our personal network of friends to find a name and a way in through the back door, do a dance and rub a stone for good luck, and hope that someone will help," she said.It's also in Google's best interest to beef up this support part of its business because even users who don't pay Google for services or software contribute significantly to the company's success, she said."Google makes it easier for us to collaborate, work, and publish. We provide the content, the searches, the clicks, and the destinations for those clicks. It's a win-win. Until you lose something important -- like all your data," she said.A sampling of recent threads in the Gmail Help forum devoted to lost messages follows:http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/aad47e2819f32e6e/0b8a9de3f9cc0e3fhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-ABCs/browse_thread/thread/7fb4071b94277d55/4a750e40abcb32efhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/7443d36a2b43c860/4ab72b69f9f1a05bhttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/948d861de7128acc/64641f442d477c0ehttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/ac9d1426cfe68e0e/c415516eb06804b6http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/bc16fb2ca342e5fe/80e3a3c44d6041fahttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/419226013062111c/7119b58486ba0a4chttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/8ca49192d1691828/bf0c9663b9b3c652http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/1fbe0cf09a8c674d/dfee6cac24f520eahttp://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/55ce3198c3a821e3/71e11cf6e1e5c56a

NewsFactor - Has the time for desktop Linux finally arrived? One relevant data point is that Wal-Mart has sold out of the Everex gPC, a Google-friendly, Linux-based PC priced at $199.

Remember when Facebook decided to open itself up so that third-party developers could build applications that work on the social networking site Earlier this month Google out-opened Facebook by introducing OpenSocial a system that lets developers build applications for Google s Orkut and all of the other partners in the initiative. What can we expect next ... Get your FREE 30 day VMware Workstation trial Now! Virtualize your desktop today with VMware Workstation.

The media generated a lot of buzz over the past few months speculating on Google s plans for a gPhone. With so many tantalizing clues who could blame them The announcement of the search giant s actual plans landed with a thud rather than a splash but in the end could be more significant even than Apple s iPhone.... Try VMWare Workstation for Free! Register here. VMware Workstation: The gold standard in desktop virtualization. Click here for your free trial.

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