Webware

Google Apps have all grown up.

No longer must Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk carry the beta tag of shame; they are all now full-fledged members of the Google family of products. Google has been hinting this was coming over the past few months, but is finally ready to make the official announcement along with the news that Fairchild Semiconductor has decided to embrace Google's suite of Web-based office productivity applications.

In truth, it's hard to tell exactly what technical advancements may have prompted the decision to lift the products out of beta. Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, said the removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability.

But Google does not have a company standard for determining when a beta project has become a more fully formed product: Gmail was in beta for five years. And paying enterprise customers will still be provided with a 99.9 percent service-level agreement now that the products are out of beta. That's the same level of service Google agreed to provide while they were in beta.

Still, Google thinks there are a number of CIOs that will find Google Apps easier to sell to their bosses if it's not formally known as a "beta" product. "It's something that does send the wrong message," Glotzbach said, referring to the historical definition of the word beta as a not-ready-for-prime-time piece of software. Google is working on developing more formal company-wide standards for how to label products with the beta tag, he said.

In the meantime, Google has added a couple of more enterprise-quality features to Gmail, allowing executives to give their assistants permission to manage their mail and corporations to set e-mail retention policies for their workers, a key feature needed by highly scrutinized companies such as Intel.

Mobile VoIP service Truphone announced Monday that it has integrated AOL Instant Messenger into its iPhone app. Besides being able to place VoIP calls, users can now log in to AOL and instant message other AIM users through the Truephone app. The software already includes support for Google Talk, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

Netbiscuits, a company that provides a Web software platform for mobile development and advertising, announced Monday that it has partnered with AdMob, the world's largest mobile-advertising service, to provide users with the advertising firm's ad placement tools. According to Netbiscuits, its software will offer users the option to integrate ads in mobile video and other media. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google announced Friday that mobile-phone users are now able to modify Google Spreadsheets. According to the company, users can view, edit, sort, and filter spreadsheets on a variety of mobile devices, including the T-Mobile G1 and iPhone.

Google's instant-messaging service suffered intermittent outages Monday, behaving inconsistently for several hours.

The issue began about 10:30 a.m. PST and affected a subset of users of both the Web page-based Gmail Chat and the installed Google Talk software, spokesman Andrew Kovacs said. Because of the problem, sometimes when people sent a message they'd get an error message it wasn't sent and the recipient didn't receive it, but often resending the message worked, he said.

"This issue has been resolved for most users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next couple of hours," Kovacs said about three hours after the problem began.

Google's core business is in search and advertising, but it's trying to expand to be a fuller-featured Internet destination with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, which collectively are offered to paying customers as Google Apps subscriptions. Google offers a service level agreement to those customers.

Palringo's the first multi-chat protocol app for the iPhone.

(Credit: Palringo)

The new iPhone app from Palringo brings an official multi-instant messaging client to the Apple device. It supports eight chat protocols and includes some useful iPhone-specific features, but also suffers from several irritating limitations.

Palringo can handle Apple iChat, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Gadu Gadu, ICQ, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger. Assuming you've got no problems with the iPhone keyboard, creating a profile for one of these accounts is as simple as selecting the proper icon and typing in your username and password. First, though, you must set up a Palringo account. Not to worry: when you open the Palringo app for the first time, it will redirect you to their Web site for registration.

When you receive a message, it gets dumped into the universal in-box at the bottom left corner of the screen. This may sounds chaotic, but I was surprised at how well it worked. The camera feature worked flawlessly, too. When you select a contact to chat with, tap the camera icon in the lower right corner and you can either take a fresh photo that will be instantly sent, or send an already-saved photo from your album.

However, do note that the photo gets uploaded to Palringo's servers and stored there for 10 days. Users must then download images to keep them. Click here to see the image that Jason Parker sent me from his iPhone.

Palringo offers a variety of status options, but no clear way to log out of one client.

(Credit: Palringo)

The big hang-up, if you'll forgive the pun, is that the app doesn't offer a way to sign out of an account once it's been created. You can change the status of an account to Invisible, Busy, or Away, with the default status being Online, but there's no way to be logged in to your AIM but not your ICQ.

Also, since the iPhone can currently use only one app at a time, you must be running the app to receive new messages. The phone vibrates when it does, but that won't do you much good without having the app always on. The promised voice-chat feature has yet to be implemented, too.

Even with these drawbacks, for people who don't have a jailbroken phone Palringo offers a solid and Apple-approved way to get access to all your IMs at once.

Google is making its Google Talk instant-messaging application available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.

One of Google's software engineers posted the news in a blog on Wednesday.

(Credit: Google)

"In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too!" Adam Connors, of Google's mobile team said in the blog.

The application doesn't require any software to be installed or downloaded. Instead it works within the phone's browser, so users can simply go to the site www.google.com/talk, sign in, and start chatting.

Connors pointed out that there are a few differences when using Google Talk on the iPhone versus a computer. For one, to receive messages, the application needs to be open on the Safari phone browser. When users navigate away from the Google Talk window in the browser, their status is set to "unavailable."

That said Google has tried to keep the experience close to what users experience on their desktop or laptop computers. They can select contacts from a quicklist, search contacts, and manage conversations.

With half the world's population soon owning a cell phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the Web via a mobile device is huge. Google recognizes this as a big advertising opportunity. As a result, the company has launched several initiatives to make sure it gets a piece of the action.

It's already adapted its Web search, mapping service, and advertising tools to work on cell phones. And it even bid in a U.S. auction of wireless spectrum to help ensure rules requiring open access on those networks were achieved. The company has even gone so far as to develop its own mobile operating system, known as Android, to ensure that its applications and services are tightly integrated into mobile devices.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you insist on chatting with Facebook and Gmail buddies outside a browser window, then it's worth taking Gabtastik for a spin, though as far as instant messaging applications go, the most interesting thing about Gabtastik is the technology.

As a Site Specific Browser (SSB) app based on Mozilla's Prism project, Gabtastik, which released a Windows beta this week, tethers the Web chat ecosystem to a desktop application. From this standpoint, Gabtastik is a success. The Facebook chat and Google Talk GUIs are spot-on. The essential problem is that the chatting isn't very interesting, and the program doesn't do much beyond keeping each site's proprietary chat actions and experience intact as is its nature as an specific, no-frills mini browser app. But good luck multichatting with contacts from both Facebook and Google--you'll have to switch between the two interfaces each time, an either/or prospectus that doesn't lend itself well to an unobstructed workflow and is worsened by the weak message notification system.

If Gabtastik can manage to create a unified interface with tabbed chatting, intuitive notification, and program preferences, and then integrate that with Meebo, Yahoo Messenger online, and Trillian Astra--whenever that comes out--it'll at least have a shot at gaining traction as a niche multinetwork Web chat client.

Gastastik for Mac has also been reviewed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google Talk users have yet another way to chat with their Gtalk buddies. The new "labs edition" which was quietly released on Friday brings to your desktop several features that previously could only be found in the Web version. Most importantly, the group chat feature which made its way into the Web version of Google Talk last year, yet was oddly missing from the desktop application until now. Also new to the desktop version are emoticons and notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Google's hot-in-Brazil social network Orkut.

Oddly enough, with these extra features there are a few features missing compared with the regular nonlabs version of Google Talk. Important things such as voice-chat and file transfers are not present--features which were the primary reason for installing the piece of desktop software over simply using the pop-out version in Gmail, or the iGoogle gadget.

As Ionut over at Google Blogoscoped notes: with the introduction of the labs edition, Google now has four separate first party tools to access the Talk network; each with overlapping, or version specific features. Something tells me a lot of folks will stick with the plain old Web version that's sitting in their Gmail in-boxes or iGoogle pages instead of dealing with either of these confusing desktop variations. Moving forward I'd like to simply see Google add experimental features to the regular software and mark them as such. Having different versions of the same software is a very Microsoft thing to do.

Google Talk labs edition throws in notifications for Gmail, Google Calendar and Orkut (not pictured).

(Credit: Google)

(Credit: Google)

Any jokes about Google becoming a self-aware, humanity-destroying robot got a little closer to fruition yesterday. Google Talk (download the desktop widget), Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots that will take whatever text you throw at it and convert it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network--as long as you've got some place to host them.

The new bots become particularly useful if you invite one into a group chat with one or more users who speak a different language. The bot will automatically translate the conversation so each user can understand one another, which you can see on the screenshot to the left.

The translation bot project was the result of some of the Google Talk team's 20 percent rule, Google's somewhat infamous option of having software engineers spend one day a week working on side projects. Besides bots, some of the other services that have come out of 20 percent time have been AdSense, Orkut, keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader, and Google News.

[Via Google Talkabout]

Amid the growing group of instant-messaging solutions for the IM-less iPhone, Mundu (a Webware 100 winner) has just released a new contender that handles four of the most popular chatting protocols with a fantastic interface. If you're an iPhone user, just navigate your Safari browser to http://iphone.mundu.com, which takes you to a log-in screen with access to your AIM, Yahoo, MSN, .Mac, and Google Talk accounts. You can log into all of them simultaneously, although there's no master password system like you get with Meebo.

Each client gets its own buddy list, and any additional conversations get their own tabs. To start a conversation, just tap a user name of one of your friends who is logged in. There's a simple form that pulls up the iPhone's keyboard when clicked. Similar to the iPhone's built-in SMS app and iChat, conversations show up as color-coded speech bubbles that can be scrolled back and forth with your finger. The refresh rate is also instantaneous, so you don't have to keep reloading the page to see new comments from your friends.

The whole app has a very organic feel that's just right. It's one of the few IM apps I've used on the iPhone where it doesn't feel like you're fighting an interface to make it feel like a desktop app. I also have to give Mundu credit for creating a neat bubbly effect on the chat tab when you've got an unread message. Sometimes it's just the little things that make Web apps more fun to use. In this case, the function is just as good as the form.

Mundu's IM client for the iPhone is slick and fun to use.

(Credit: Mundu.com)