is Google going to change the Internet? well, that seems to be the idea. Isn’t the fact that the term ‘google’ is now a commonplace verb enough indication? Here’s a quick look at some of the bright ideas that they have spawned in the recent past.

Chrome OS: we all know about Chrome, the lightweight, lightening-fast browser. but is it smart enough to form the basis of an entire operating system? the answer is—you guessed it—of course. the open source Google Chrome OS (not to be confused with the Android operating system for mobile phones) is expected to see a first stable release in the second half of 2010, and is specifically aimed at netbooks to begin with. ‘Speed, simplicity and security’ are the key features of Chrome OS, and in their own words, it’s an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Based on Linux, the Chrome OS turns the basic concept of an operating system on its head. the main interface of the system will the browser, with applications incorporated like web pages in a tab strip. of course, Google will retain the Chrome browser’s minimalist interface, and are said to be working towards security nuts and bolts in such a way as to make viruses and other malware history.

Aimed at users who primarily spend most of their time online, Chrome OS is rumoured to favour solid state drives—as seen in a wide selection of Netbooks—over regular hard drives. as to whether it can muscle out Windows as a preferred operating system is something only time will tell.

Google Wave: the latest wave to have crashed upon the Google shore is a real-time communication and collaboration tool called Google Wave. It is still in ‘preview’ status, and one has to sign up for an invite.

Wave merges email, instant messaging and social networking to form the ultimate Web-based collaborative service. A ‘wave’ is equal parts document and conversation, where people can communicate and work together, using not just text, but photos, videos, maps and so on. Wave users share and collaborate equally, and one can turn back to see who said what and when. Also, a wave is live, that is, the working, sharing, discussing, editing all happens in real time. whether it is working on collaborative projects, exchanging post-holiday photos, playing games, or conducting an official meeting, Google Wave helps us integrate the Web a little bit more in our everyday lives.

In keeping with their open source policy, the code of Google Wave will be released to allow developers as well as users to build extensions that will support additional features, including the possibility of embedding the service on Websites.

Google Go: the company is also developing a brand new, open source programming language—Google Go—whose USP is performance and speed. Despite leaps and bounds in hardware, the software that runs this technology is a dinosaur from the past. Go is Google’s attempt to help programming language catch up with hardware and web developments in an efficient manner. at present Go compilers are available for Linux and Mac OS platforms, but a Windows implementation is on the horizon. unlike what the Merry Melodies toons tell us, with Google, ‘that’s certainly not all, folks.’ Watch this space.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer

San Francisco — Google is currently testing a new appearance for its iconic search page, featuring cleaner, bolder graphics and a default side bar with bigger search buttons, brighter colors — bold white typeface on bright blue — with a slightly different logo, one without the shadows.

The new aspect is being discovered by a small number of Google users over the past week or so who have already been witnessing the changes as the company tests the new user interface, but not everybody was able to gain access to the interface, although it is not clear when, if ever, the new search interface will be widely deployed.

As you can notice from screen shots below, the revamped Google logo ditches its 3D shading and shadows while the search buttons switch to white text against a bright blue gradient background. it would appear the search team has been smitten by the look of the company’s new collaboration stuff, Google Wave.

The appearance of the search results also have been altered with the left panel added to the page. the panel suggests a user to choose between image, video, news, maps, and other kinds. Besides, the sidebar similar to Bing’s version also includes a list of similar searches with the option to filter the results based on the date Google sniffed out the website.

According to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, informed Search Engine Land last week that the new pages are intended to eliminate inconsistencies in how Google presented search results after it added several new elements to the page. But it also mimics what Yahoo and Microsoft have been doing with their search results pages, focusing on presentation and new ways to sort results.

On Wednesday, Gizmodo issued some tips on how to force Google into serving the new pages, and therefore we can bring you some screen shots of the new look and feel for Google search. for those who cannot resist the temptation for a wider roll out, the code below allows users to try the new look ahead of schedule.

First log out of your Google account. Next, from Google.com, copy and paste the following piece of code into your browser’s address bar:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U= 4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

(Those outside the US may need to force the .com locale by using google.com/ncr/)

After reloading the page, the redesign should appear. Note the new look appear across the entire website. Services like Google News and Maps will still use the current Google UI.

Search engine giant Google is testing out a new look for its search page.
Designers have removed the 3D shading and shadowing from behind the Google logo, while blue boxes with white text have been used for the search options “Google Search” and “I´m Feeling Lucky”.

The new design also includes a left-hand sidebar on the search results page which allows the user to quickly select between images, videos, news, maps, and other options.

A “see also” section, which suggests related search terms, search queries and an option to filter the results based on the date Google sniffed out the website, has also been added.

According to a Softpedia news editor, the new interface is a step in the right direction.

“It´s still the same minimalist Google design that we all know and love, but it´s gotten a bit livelier,” he added.

The new design has been compared to Google Wave, the search engine´s online tool for real-time communication.

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Google Voice just keeps getting better and better, and sometimes it does so without the help of Google.

Developer Chad Smith today released a new version of his Google Voice dialer, which takes the service that’s so handy on the Google Voice page, and basically puts it on every web page. now there’s no need to migrate to a different page to make a call, and a number that’s on a page can now be dialed with a click.

It’s a feature that those who use iPhones have come to enjoy. when looking at a web page with a phone number, the iPhone software automatically makes that a link and when you touch that number you can dial it.

Now you can do that same thing from home.

I first learned about Smith because he wrote the very first Add-on to Google Wave, which I still find very useful. like Wave, Google Voice is still somewhat limited in release, but just like with Wave, if you don’t have an invite, the best idea is to just ask around among your friends; they may have an invite and not even know it. There’s no add-on for this, your pals will have to go to the Google Voice page, and at the bottom of the left column it will show how many invites they have left to give.

While Google Apps will always have a soft spot in my heart for freeing me from Outlook I’d be the first to admit its UI is getting rather tired. so it appears would Google…

Leaked to Engadget today are some seemingly legit screenshots of new interfaces for Gmail, Google News and Google Docs all integrating Google Wave-style layouts. the site’s tipster said “the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.).”

Certainly makes sense to us, and – as Engadget itself postulates – suggests that Google Wave (despite a somewhat mixed initial reaction) is fundamental to the search giant’s future plans. could it also be combined with the newly launched Google Dashboard to provide a unified experience in the impending Chrome OS? Well it wouldn’t hurt.

Donning my sceptical hat for a minute, let’s not get too carried away before an official Google confirmation/denial. still given my own personal view is Google Wave isn’t a replacement for email, but blending its key functionality into email would be very welcome indeed..

Rest of the screenshots below.

In related news Google News could come under threat from a charged up News Corp after chairman and overlord Rupert Murdock said he will block aggregator sites from listing its content. Speaking to Sky Australia he said: “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep”

As for those publications who cite stories originated from News Corp publications (which include the Times and the Sun): “if you look at them [referencing the BBC], most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we’ll be suing them for copyright”.

Better? we beg to differ, but a brave new world awaits journalism and one everyone will be monitoring with interest.

Link:
via Engadget

What is common among Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, and Email? These are conversation tools. how will a conversation on today’s web look like? Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that’s no longer the case today. Google, Mozilla, Salesforce.com, and some others are trying to carve a niche for them in the global conversation platforms.

Google Wave, a personal communication and collaboration tool, was announced by Google (GOOG) at the Google I/O conference on may 27, 2009. A beta version was released on September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from twenty to thirty additional users. Mozilla’s announcement of raindrop project in October has made Google team to hasten Google Wave launch for the general public. Now the cloud-computing player Salesforce.com (CRM) has announced the launch a platform that will act as a “Facebook for the Enterprise.” Salesforce.com claims that it will revolutionize the workplace by leveraging the social-networking revolution. Can Salesforce.com challenge Google Wave? before answering that question, let’s examine Google Wave.

About 100,000 general users are currently testing Google’s new Collaboration 2.0 platform, Google Wave. Wave is still in development, and it is too early to definitively judge its capabilities. At this stage, Wave seems unlikely to emerge as the best-available Collaboration 2.0 platform on the market. It will also most likely appeal to consumers, at least initially, based on its current features. Yet Wave should be considered a potential first step in the ubiquitous adoption of Collaboration 2.0 in general, with consumer adoption acting as the impetus for enterprise usage.

Wave has many of the standard components of a Collaboration 2.0 platform. It combines social networking and document and file sharing with email and instant messaging, within a browser-based wiki environment. Users can edit and share various types of rich data and files, as well as communicate with email and instant messaging, within a single, real-time online platform.

However, unlike other 2.0 platforms that have been developed specifically for enterprise use (which I refer to as Enterprise Collaboration 2.0), Wave is currently not suited to project management because it has a many-to-many communication format. This means that it lacks linearity and leads to a chaotic experience for users. furthermore, it is currently difficult to manage its social networking features adequately, making it unwieldy, and early testers have complained that it is overly complicated to use.

BEIJING, November 18 (Xinhuanet) — Email, or electronic mail, may become a thing of the past if research conducted by ISP TalkTalk and the University of Kent is to be believed. According to researchers social networking sites and Instant Message platforms are fast replacing traditional email. Twitter facilitates having several accounts and a method by which people may send private or Direct Messages to each other. Business social networking site LinkedIn has recently installed a Twitter interface into its site and Facebook already facilitates users sending instant messages.

The use Instant Messaging services like MSN Messenger Google Talk and QQ, which is popular in Asia, has grown in recent years particularly among younger Internet users. the research showed that youngsters in their late teens or early twenties much preferred using the likes of Twitter or MSN Messenger. only half of them used email regularly.

While email may not die out imediately it is clear that the format for online communication is changing. In September Google unveiled its much talked about Google Wave. Although only around 100,000 invites were initially sent out the non-linear approach to messaging has many people very excited. Google wave enable several people to take part in a conversation, called a Wave, and may add picture, video, maps as well as text to any part of an ongoing thread.

Internet Service Provider TalkTalk stated on its blog, “Email has been the dominant mode of communication over the internet for the past 20 years, but that doesn’t mean it always will be…Increasingly people want to send quick, short messages reaching many people in one go, and there are now better ways of doing that than via email.”

Editor: Zheng Limin | Source: Xinhua

In our continuing efforts to help as many of our readers get a chance to play around with Google Wave as possible, we’re back again with our weekly Google Wave invitation donation thread. Note: Read the entire post carefully before commenting.

If you’ve got Wave invitations you’re willing to donate, post a comment below, saying something like: “I’ve got 10 Wave invites; who wants one?” In that case, the first ten people to reply to that comment providing that generous soul with a means to invite you get invitations.

Here’s the important part:

Do not start a thread unless you have invitations to hand out. these threads get unwieldy very quickly if we don’t follow some ground rules. despite that, we really want to help give our readers a chance to try Wave, so we’re giving it a go anyway. Please, please only start a thread if you’ve got invitations. Don’t just post your email address thirty times hoping someone will grab it. If you want an invitation, reply to someone who’s offering one. Finally, it takes our interns hours to admin comments every day, and these threads wreak havoc on their efforts, so if you don’t already have an approved commenter account, please don’t comment on this thread.

Make sense? good luck, and thanks to everyone who’s donating invitations. If you do happen to secure an invitation, be sure to check out The Complete Guide to Google Wave, Gina and Adam’s comprehensive book on Wave.

Note: If you’re posting comments but they aren’t showing up on the post, that means you are not an approved commenter. How can you become an approved commenter? Read our comment FAQ. In the meantime, please don’t post any more comments on this thread asking for invitations if you’re not an approved commenter.

Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.

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At the Real Time Crunchup today in San Francisco, there’s a ton of talk about Twitter, of course, and also the social networks and the way that they all work together. there have been a series of presentations from companies that have solutions that fix some subset of all the long list of annoyances about using those tools.

Facebook was basically prodded into announcing that it would share its lists of friends, and so we should see a bunch of applications that compare lists.

Some of them try to connect the networks all together, some make it easier to see what all the linking is all about.

There are others, and they are all worth a look, but they are all fixing things that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. if I want to reply to a tweet and have everyone know which tweet I am replying to, well, I should be able to. The reality now is that I can’t in any meaningful way without giving up most of my 140 characters.

I keep waiting for Wave to fix all this. And it may.

But it’s not right now. not even close.

I would like to be able to report that Wave worked successfully as a backchannel of communication for the Crunchup conference, but it did not, at least before the lunch break.

Last week it worked very well as a backchannel for the Defrag Conference. Now I was able to attend that one in person, so I’m sure that made a difference, but the theory of Wave, especially with a conference being webcast free around the world, is that lots of people could join in to create a living document that would be part transcript, part links and discussion, and part creation of a new form of communication.

Maybe I just didn’t do a good enough job of publicizing that the wave existed, but I think the reality is that Defrag was much more of a show about the future of the web, really looking forward. Because of that it had more people interested in Wave; interested in trying it and thinking about it, even though it has tons of bugs and a funky UI.

The Real Time Crunchup, however, is Twitter-like. It’s about what’s happening right now. Most of the conversation from the stage that I’ve been able to catch is about what’s already happening, what people are doing. there have been presentations from companies who hope to be the future of socially connected communications, but not one of them has the economic or intellectual heft to be considered a true vision for the future.

Even as big as Twitter is now, it’s still essentially a feature within the larger scope of communication, and may grow or may just fade away like the hula-hoop. I really don’t know. I do know that Twitter has the lucky coincidence of history in that it is perfectly meshed to the way our brain hands out rewards for broadcasting our own version of micro-celebrity status.

Wave really has an opportunity to fix so much of what is broken in communications, and it still may, but here in Real Time, it’s being written off because nobody is using it.

That lack of use is an important fact to know right now, but I think that it is being shortsighted to say that Wave won’t be the future because it’s not being used now.

You are welcome to join the Wave I started about the Real Time Crunchup (if you are in Wave now) by clicking here.

If you have a news tip or story idea about Wave, well, I’m like a waiter: I live on the tips. Contact me on Sco.tt, or in Wave on “scodtt” or via Twitter using the button below.
Also, be sure to grab the RSS feed or subscribe to my email using the buttons above so you can get all the very best in Google Wave news and analysis from a non-technical perspective.

The new technology, called Salesforce Chatter, however, sounds eerily close to what Google is trying to achieve with Wave, which it claims is going to replace email as a work tool.

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. “Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. my employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need.”

Like a social network

The new Salesforce Chatter technology promises that content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be deeply connected.

In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social.

Salesforce.com is the only company uniquely positioned to deliver a social, enterprise-scale application and platform like Chatter because of its world-class security, trusted sharing model and the critical business information stored in Salesforce.com’s cloud apps. Salesforce Chatter will be Salesforce.com’s first enterprise-wide app, bringing the power of cloud computing to every employee.

“Salesforce Chatter is a true breakthrough, bringing social computing to the enterprise,” said Bruce Richardson of AMR.

“Salesforce.com has created a Facebook for the enterprise by combining real-time, familiar social-networking features like profiles and feeds, with the enterprise-tested, secure sharing model required by businesses that is the at the foundation of Salesforce.com. This is going to change the way business thinks about collaboration.”

Use of information

The Salesforce Chatter technology allows users to make use of people profiles and status updates, stream news feeds, work with a number of teams, and deploy social apps and social content across the internet.

The Chatter application will also enable users to filter the most relevant Twitter feeds into their Chatter app. for example, a user can set up a Twitter search for a competitor and automatically stream the real-time results into Chatter.

Employees can also use Facebook to pull information from their Facebook profiles to auto populate their Chatter profiles.

The new app will also be available on any BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device or iPhone, heralding a promising unified communications element to the whole vision.

“Twitter is based on the idea that the open exchange of information has a positive global impact. we see a lot of the same inspiration behind Chatter. we think it will enable employees to find more information, more quickly, from the people and content that matters most to them,” said Jason Goldman, director of products, Twitter.

Photo: Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.