Google News & Articles

Two weeks ago, everybody was talking about it. It manhandled the blogosphere, was a trending topic on Twitter, and whispers of it could still be heard coming from the mouths of various Gilbane SF attendees last week.

And, OK, we admit it; Google Wave romanced us a little, too. But now that the smoke has cleared and Wave has had ample time to settle into the ‘net, the inevitable troop of naysayers has surfaced. Let’s check out what they have to say:

If you are just getting into the web development business and you want to build cloud-based applications, there's no better place to start than with Google. The Google App Engine (news, site) is Google's infrastructure for building and running cloud-based applications.

While there's a lot of documentation on developing using the Google App Engine on Google's website itself, there's another way to learn how to develop these applications - where you are a beginner or an expert.

O'Reilly has released the book Using Google App Engine - Start Building and Running Web Apps on Google's Infrastructure. The book is written by Charles Severance, Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and someone who has extensive experience with the development languages used to write Google Apps.

What will you learn? You will learn:

• Web programming and the move to develop cloud-based applications
• The basic technologies used to develop Google Apps including Python, HTML and CSS
• How to Use the Google App Engine Datastore
• How to Implement Caching and Use Cookies and Session
• Installing and Running the App Engine on XP, Vista, Mac and Linux
• and much more

The book is designed for beginners, but offers information that will benefit even the more experienced Google App developer.

Pick up your copy of Using Google App Engine on O'Reilly for US$ 29.99.

Google (news, site) released Google Search Appliance 6.0, offering brand new architecture that promises improved scalability, customization and search results quality.

If you’ve never heard of AdventNet Inc., you’re not alone, and they’re not worried, you weren’t their target audience anyway -- until now.

Over the last few years, the 13-year-old software company based in Pleasanton, California has quietly carved out an online empire known to most of us as Zoho.com and after years with an obscure name, they have embraced the brand which they believe best represents the next evolution of the company.

Both e-mail and instant messaging are pretty basic ideas. Originally designed back in the ‘60s, the two electronic earth-shakers were made to replace what we had back then: the telephone and snail mail.

Consider what we have now: blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. Is it possible our faithful forms of communication are outdated? Google (news, site) thinks so. In an attempt to infuse old ideas with new technology once again, Google Wave is born. The communication service is a sort of e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, networking mashup, and Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today.

As per usual for Big G, the tool is already making waves.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Baby Boomers Turned Off By Facebook?
• Google 'Waves' To Unified Social Communication
• Social Media And It's Affect On Corporate Websites
• Twitter May Start a TV Show

Bada boom, bada bing!

That’s how quickly things seem to happen in the webverse anyway, the search engine avenue being no exception. Accordingly, recently there have been rumors backed by heavy advertising dollars that Microsoft (news, site) plans to release a search engine called "Bing."

As is inevitable whenever big names put out new solutions, "Bing" is already being compared to offerings from other big names. In fact, much like the ongoing Mac vs. PC battle, we’re seeing Microsoft's new offering propositioned as competition for the biggest name.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Facebook Verified App Directory Now Live
• Flock is Updated With More Support for Twitter, Other Services
• Facebook Accepts OpenID
• Should You Switch Back To Yahoo! For Search?

As we've discussed before, the semantic web is supposed to help with issues where computers just have no idea of what they're seeing in any context. The problem was getting people to take advantage of this technology in any real numbers.

Well, if you care about Search Engine Optimization (and who doesn't?) then it's time to wake up and smell the semantics. Otherwise, your search results will plummet as SEO gold goes to those who take advantage of Google's new tool: the Rich Snippet.

And Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) seems to agree completely.

The public beta was released only days ago, but Australian CMS vendor Siteflex has shown us just how fast the Google Data Analytics API can be integrated into a web content management system.

Google (news, site) is taking another step towards real competition with Microsoft in the productivity solutions department. They have announced Google Apps Directory Sync -- the ability to provision users and groups from your own internal directory services be it Active Directory, Lotus Domino or another LDAP solution with your Googe Apps accounts.

The next phase of Google's Summer of Code reveals that Google is sponsoring stipends for 18 Drupal developers. Out of this total of US$ 90,000 in stipends, US$ 4,500 goes to each of the selected student developers and US$ 500 goes to the Drupal Association or to the mentors who guide the students.

Each of the 18 students is working on a different project, including a Drupal first. The father-son team of Jim and Jimmy Berry will work on one of the projects together, bringing the idea of the Drupal family up to a new level.

For information on the 18 projects, the students behind them and the mentors, see the official Drupal announcement. Many more open source and CMS-related projects were selected for the Google Summer of Code as well, including PHP, Joomla!, Plone and others.

Google Analytics is a very popular website analytics tool. This is partly because it's free, but also because it offers a lot of useful analytics on what's happening with your website. But people have been asking for just a little bit more from Google.

Now they have delivered. Google has made available a Google Analytics API that provides you with read-only access to your analytics data to integrate into your own custom applications and mashups.

Last summer, Microsoft tossed Microsoft PubCenter to the wolves (beta testers) to see how it would do. Recently, some extremely positive feedback has surfaced.

The mega company’s advertising program, which was originally thought to be gearing up to be some serious competition for Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher network, is currently being tested through ad network YieldBuild. Interestingly, the network reports that the program will work better alongside its competition rather than in place of it.

Last week there was some chatter floating around on the Internet concerning whether or not Google’s old analytics code would be made obsolete, and what would happen to the 40% of analytics users still employing it.

Thankfully, Google quelled the fears of most by releasing a statement claiming urchin.js isn’t going anywhere. At least not yet.