Posts Filed Under ‘Cloud Computing’
This Week in Google Video Podcast Now in iTunes ·
I've been a slacker posting up the YouTube videos of each week's This Week in Google episode, so I'm getting back to it. This past week was particularly fun for me because Jeff, Leo, and I were joined by Kevin Purdy, my colleague from Lifehacker who shares my enthusiasm for Android. The TWiT folks also tell me that TWiG video is now available in the iTunes Store as well; here are the feed links for TWiG video both large and small.
· 6 days ago
What is Google Wave? · Over at Macworld this morning, I took a shot at explaining what Google Wave is (and isn't). Even in a Wave-backlash/Buzz-love world, I'm still bullish about Wave. It's the best collaboration webapp I've ever used. Once you've experienced inline replies in a wave with your group, you never want to email again. · 3 weeks ago, 2 comments
As promised, Google Docs has rolled out the "upload any file" feature that lets you store files up to 250MB in size in Docs (up to 1GB for free, $0.25 per extra GB).
Just checked my account and got the notification near the Upload button explaining the new capability. Coupled with the ability to share folders, this can easily be used to share any kind of media--like an album of MP3s, as shown in the screenshot (supplied by a reader).
About That Google Server Breach · Douglas Rushkoff floats the idea that Google's China announcement is a smokescreen for the fact that their servers got hacked--which means your data isn't safe in the cloud. A serious and well-publicized security breach would be a crushing setback in Google's cloud apps business. Was the China surveillance and Gmail break-in it, and we just missed it amidst all the cheering? The question mark at the end of his headline makes me think that Rushkoff's unconvinced about his own thesis; still, it's an interesting theory. [via] · January 14th, 2010, 4 comments
Free Cloud Backup at Backupify (Till January 31st) · Cloud data backup service, Backupify, has dropped its paywall until January 31st in an effort to acquire more customers. The service backs up Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, WordPress, Delicious, and FriendFeed data, to name a few, though apparently the file format you get when you restore your data may not be the most useful to non-programmers (i.e., XML documents). I haven't tried Backupify myself, but this offer is tempting. ZDNet's Between the Lines blog has the full story: Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. · December 22nd, 2009, 5 comments
Update Your Google Account Password Recovery Options · Now that you're auditing your online account security, log into your Google account(s) and visit the Account Recovery Options page. Here you can update your secret question and answer, your secondary email address, and even associate your mobile phone number with your account so you can get a password recovery code via text message. (Just a tip: don't set your Google Voice number as the phone number or automatically forward mail from your secondary email accounts to your Gmail account--if you do, in the event that you lose your password, the recovery process won't work.) · December 19th, 2009, 3 comments
Year-End To-do: Audit Your Email Account Security · Two stories of online account break-ins this week: First, Twitter.com got redirected to an Iranian hacker page because attackers were able to get into the email account registered with their site DNS service. Second, savvy blogger Amit Agarwal's Gmail and Google Apps accounts were taken over because the attacker got access to Amit's secondary email address and sent a password change request there to get into the accounts. Do yourself a favor: Before 2010 is upon us, do a quick audit of all your most important accounts. Make sure your passwords are strong and remember: Never use inactive webmail as your secondary email account. · December 19th, 2009
This past year was a watershed moment for the real-time web, cloud computing, and mobile application development, thanks in large part to Google. This morning over at Lifehacker, I rounded up the biggest Google product releases and updates of 2009.
I may co-host a weekly podcast dedicated to Google news, but seeing the amount of mind-bending stuff Google released this year in one place still blew my mind.
While Google's three biggest launches of the year--Wave, Chromium OS, and Droid/Android 2.0--are still very much developer/early-adopter-only, their impact will resonate through the next ten years on the web (even if they don't stick around in their current forms). For more on Google app updates, acquisitions, legal battles, and a complete timeline of what came out when this year, check it out: This Year in Google: The 2009 Edition.
Forbes on Google Apps in the Enterprise · "Google now has 1,000 of its 20,000 employees working on enterprise products, largely Apps. Four hundred are engineers; most of the rest are involved in sales and support, a high proportion at engineer-dominated Google. The enterprise is still dwarfed by Microsoft, which makes $19 billion from the office suite. Still, 2 million businesses have signed on to use Google software in its short life, drawn by cost, speed, collaboration and control." · December 11th, 2009, 2 comments
Google: “Faces are objects that can be recognized” · Now that you can point your cameraphone at an object and get Google search results back about that image, what about photographing a stranger and getting Google results back for his or her name? With facial recognition in Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, that doesn't seem far-fetched. Today Google confirmed that the search engine could recognize faces based on photos, but they decided not to enable that functionality until they "work through issues of user privacy." (These quotes may not be exact; pulled from Danny Sullivan's liveblog of Google’s Web Search “Evolution” Event today.) · December 7th, 2009
See whether or not your ISP's DNS server is faster or slower than other alternatives like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS with Namebench. This free benchmarking tool pits your current DNS servers against alternatives and generates handy charts and recommendations for which of your DNS choices are the fastest. Using either your browser history or Alexa's top 10,000 global domain names, by default Namebench runs 200 tests to see which resolve most quickly using regional DNS servers, public services like Google's and OpenDNS's, and your current DNS services. Here's what some of the benchmark results look like.
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Now that both Google Public DNS and OpenDNS offer an alternative, public DNS services anyone can opt to use instead of their service provider's DNS servers, the question is: how do you know if your DNS service isn't working properly and if you should switch? Reader Nicholas has the answer. He says:
The easiest way to determine if your chosen DNS servers are down, you can use nslookup or dig command line tools. Open a command line prompt (Select “Start > Run” and type “cmd” on a Windows machine, “Applications > Utilities > Terminal” on the Mac) and type:
dig google.com
or
nslookup google.com
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Yesterday on This Week in Google while I was complaining that Google's acquisition of EtherPad should have been handled much more gracefully--by, you know, notifying EtherPad users before they shut down the service--EtherPad was doing an about-face. The collaborative text editor service will now stay online and open for new pads "at least" until the creators open-source the code, to ensure "no or minimal service disruption in the future." This is exactly what they should have done in the first place.
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Google Public DNS Service at Lucky IP 8.8.8.8 · Today Google launches their new public DNS service, which aims to speed up the time it takes for your browser to find web sites. To use it, set your DNS server address to 8.8.8.8--a lucky IP address, at least in Chinese culture (thx @blam). DNS aficionados already know that OpenDNS has offered a free, distributed DNS service for years. In response to Google Public DNS, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch says OpenDNS is still a better choice because it offers more options and ways to control your web surfing experience. · December 4th, 2009, 6 comments
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As promised, Google Docs has rolled out the "upload any file" feature that lets you store files up to 250MB in size in Docs (up to 1GB for free, $0.25 per extra GB). 
I'm 
