Google Bonding With ISPs

On Friday of last week, Google announced that they would now begin offering their Google Apps for Your Domain to ISPs, making the popular web apps available to, potentially, thousands of ISP subscribers as ISP-branded services. Hunter Middleton, Google Apps product manager, stated "Today, we’re excited to take another step in that direction by releasing a version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether you have a few thousand subscribers or over a million." Deemed "Google Apps Partner Edition", Google states the service can:

• Decrease ISP operating costs
• Provide a better user experience for subscribers
• Increase the amount of email storage for subscribers
• Offer customers the very latest innovation from Google, on your domain

With the Partner Edition, small ISPs can operate with low overhead, as they would no longer incur the expense of having to maintain their own email servers. Additionally, the service can be branded with the ISP’s domain info and logo. Although low-cost, the service will not be free to partners, with fees most likely to be based on number of subscribers. This is one area that Google had not yet ventured into, even though Yahoo and MSN both have numerous partners in this arena already. I would have loved to have Google as a choice when I signed up for FIOS; as it was, I only had Verizon Yahoo or Verizon MSN. (via Ars Technica)

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They’re everywhere these days - the snap.com previews! As your mouse moves across the screen, the pop-up website previews display, often hiding the text you were trying to read. However, their profusion must mean that they are popular…or are they? When I saw this tip via LifeHacker, I began to wonder if perhaps a snap.com backlash is coming: "How to Disable Snap.com Previews." Useful little tip - I think I might be implementing it, but would you? How do you feel about the snap.com previews? Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Take the poll:

Google Blogoscoped is reporting the latest Google rumor - that Google could be acquiring the popular RSS management & stats service. Tony Ruscoe writes, "Not only would this deal allow Google to provide better stats for feeds – which they could then integrate into their new version of Google Analytics – but they could also allow users to more easily include AdSense (or DoubleClick) ads in their feeds and provide better support for Blogger and all their other services which produce RSS or Atom feeds." However, not everyone is excited about this possible purchase; Matthew Hurst of Data Mining laments, "This has me worried. Google hasn’t been hitting at 100% for the companies it has acquired…FeedBurner, while a big fish in the blogosphere is going to look like plankton in the Googleplex. Will it survive? Will my stats disappear?"

Personally, I’d like to have the possibility of inserting Adsense into my feed, as long as it’s in addition, and not instead of, the other ad opportunities that Feedburner currently offers.

Last week, Yahoo! announced their new mission statement: "To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge." Good, they finally have figured out what they are all about - the people! I think they are now finally on the right track. The company has been scrambling to define themselves since the leaked internal memo from last November dubbed the "Peanut Butter Manifesto," where Yahoo!’s strategy was likened to peanut butter, as in "spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular." Post-manifesto, Yahoo execs made the decision to re-org Yahoo into three divisions - one focused on technology, one focused on Advertisers and Publishers, and a third, the Network Division, which now includes "the majority of Yahoo!’s consumer-facing products — our Communications products such as Mail and Messenger; our Community and Social Media properties including Groups, Flickr and Bix; our Search products including Web Search and Answers; the Media properties comprising our News & Information and Entertainment business units; and our Front Doors including the Yahoo.com home page and My Yahoo!." The Network Division not only houses these myriad of assets under one roof, they are also focusing on the company’s strengths and eliminating the redundancies and less successful entities. This can be seen in the recent decision to close Yahoo Auctions and Yahoo Photos (hoping to merge that property into flickr). Now if they would just dump MyWeb and focus on del.icio.us, we would be all set. (via Read/Write Web)

P.S. Yahoologigans, the blog pic is Yahoo wallpaper

Here are five more reasons for me to bite the bullet and get a new laptop: Darao, a video playlist mashup; my.vpod.tv, with its full-screen experience; special10.tv, an indie channel of music and documentaries;   neave.tv, a full-screen re-streamer of YouTube, blip.tv, and Google video; and, of course, the service that started all this chaos, Joost. The web is booming with these video services these days and my celeron-powered Inspiron 1100 just can’t keep up anymore. It used to be that if you needed a laptop just for surfing the web, you didn’t have to go all out, but now that the pipe is bigger (thank you, FIOS), there is just so much more to see, do, and stream. (source: Go2Web2)

• Did you get the option to demo the Google Powerpoint killer in your Gmail? Rafe Needleman of Webware did…sweet!
• Jenny finds a way I can easily convert my records to mp3s. Love that ThinkGeek.com!
• Bill found software to convert TV to iPod format at iPodifier
• Joe scoffs at Babelgum, a Joost clone
• Former spam fighters from Blue Security have gone to the dark side
• Silverlight podcast at CNET’s Real Deal
• Flickr censorship? Say it ain’t so!
• Google Earth 4.1 released, has Vista support (via Googling Google)
• How to setup your XBox to use Windows LIve Messenger for IM
• Joe gives tips on how to be productive with web 2.0 services

Amazon has announced that they will start selling DRM-free songs in a digital music store launching later this year. The store will carry millions of songs from 12,000 records labels, including the big label, EMI. In fact, EMI is the only big music label to be for DRM-free music, having recently announced DRM-free music at Apple iTunes store. The rest of the major music labels have been fighting tooth-and-nail to keep their tunes copyright-protected. So I say that we, the consumers, speak our minds with our pocketbooks, since money is the only language the labels seem to speak. To support EMI’s DRM-free artists, shop EMI only, when purchasing from major labels. From this long list of popular EMI artists, there’s certainly at least one or two you’ll enjoy. You can support the artists while also supporting the fight to end copyright protection forever. Fair use has a posse!

Today at Google’s Searchology event, Google made some big product announcements. These included the following:

1. Universal Search - Google aims to integrate their search products (image, maps, video, etc.) so when you do a Google search, you will see the variety of results on one page without having to click another link. Here’s an example. Here’s another. Oooh, did Google just get their images in my news results? Or did my news results just get in Google’s images?
2. Google Video Search - now it searches other video sites besides just Google Video and YouTube. This is a no-brainer, and frankly, should have been done a long time ago.
3. Google Experimental launched - with Google Experimental, you can test out new, experimental features like timeline and keyboard shortcuts. When can I test out that feature where I can Google my brain? I still have trouble finding stuff in there…

Like Ustream.tv, Mogulus is a new live blogging service that will soon offer some features Ustream does not. If you’re not familiar with the term, "live blogging" is the new slang for live video broadcasting and it’s all the rage with the tech crowd. Popularized by the addictive Justin.tv, a 24/7 video stream of a San Francisco guy named Justin, live blogging has really started to take off. Ustream was one of the first on the block to make live streaming easy for everyone and now Mogulus kicks it up a notch. With Mogulus, you and your friends can search together, mix together and broadcast together from your webcams. You can make your own channel, sourcing videos from your PC or from video sharing websites like YouTube. Mogulus also offers ways to add custom graphics to your channel, including a ticker, full screen sting, coming soon, straps, and over the shoulder bug - just like you’d see on a major network broadcast. Best of all, Mogulus aims to be easy enough for everyone to use - you don’t need to be an experienced editor or vidoegrapher to understand how to use it: if you can blog, you can live blog. Mogulus is currently in beta, but you can apply for the beta on their site now.

The Internet is Dangerous! In a research paper put out by Google engineers, it was reported that malware downloads are found in 1 out of every 10 websites. This study was based on the analysis of 4.5 million URLs, out of which 450,000 contained some form of malicious code. (via Webware). So, what can you do? Well, if you’re a Firefox user (as you should be!), you can use Firekeeper. With Firekeeper, a Firefox add-on, you can detect, block and get warnings about malicious websites. Although still in alpha, this intrusion detection and prevention system is a good, and free, way of keeping yourself safe on the net.