google

Salesforce-Google collaboration paves way for Web-oriented architecture

Salesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.

But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.

While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.

The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now. … Read more

Google dips toes into 'deep Web' search

Google's ever-active search bots, which scour the Web constantly for new pages, have begun a new, more active phase of their indexing jobs.

In a blog post Friday, Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy of Google's crawling and indexing team said the company has begun an experiment in which its indexing software experimentally enters text in Web site forms to see what previously undiscovered pages may appear.

"In the past few months, we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new Web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users … Read more

Google mapping spec now an industry standard

Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data.

KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth, the company's software for flying over the surface of a virtual globe. With its 3D coordinate-based system, people can create models of city buildings, draw a line showing where they hiked, or overlay their own custom place names on a generic map.

Google already shared its KML format openly, and others had used it in software products, but Google now hopes … Read more

A to-do list slip-up, not new a Google Docs app

OK, Google watchers, you can slow down your pulse. That to-do list posting on the Google Docs blog appears to have been an innocent mix-up.

Google marketing manager Andrew Chang inadvertently published his to-do list on a blog while testing his posting software. It wasn't a hastily removed preview of a new Google online to-do list application, a possibility some raised.

"I was testing out a feature that allows you to create and edit blog posts in Docs and publish them directly to your blog," Chang said in a follow-up post afterward. "One button click later, … Read more

Microsoft bears shield, as Salesforce and Google synch up

With the Salesforce.com-Google collaboration, Microsoft will face yet another competitor in the online enterprise software applications market, analysts say.

But make that enterprise with a little "e."

Google's online applications will be integrated with Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) applications, giving it an entry point into Salesforce's customer base of mainly small to midsize customers and department-level groups of large corporations, said Kevin Buttigieg, an analyst at the Stanford Group.

"It expands the distribution of Google Apps," Buttigieg said, noting that the search giant likely views it as a starting point to … Read more

Google's festering problem with the AGPL

Google apparently likes open source that lets it "borrow" open-source software while giving comparatively little back, and always on Google's terms. While I think Google has been doing better of late vis-a-vis open source, its policy of blocking projects from its Google Code forge that are licensed under the AGPL is wrong and a betrayal of the open-source principles it claims to respect and approve.

As Google's Chris DiBona says,

In fact we do not support the AGPL on code.google.com....It is also not okay to host an AGPL covered program on code.google.com by saying it is GPL, as you are telling the users of the site one thing, while meaning something else altogether. So sadly, the answer is to remove your project and host somewhere else like sf or savannah.

Well, no, Chris, AGPL is not "meaning something else altogether." It actually means precisely what the GPL was always intended to mean: Reciprocity. It is likely true that Google doesn't like that reciprocity requirement, but that's "something else altogether."

What is the AGPL? It's the Affero General Public License, and finishes the job that GPLv3 was supposed to do: Broaden the definition of "distribution" enough to keep Web freeriders like Google, Digg, etc. from using open-source code without contributing back.… Read more

Google, Salesforce link up for business apps

Updated April 14, 5:20 AM PDT to reflect official announcement.

It has hardly been a well-kept secret. Now, Salesforce.com and Google have made it official: they're linking up to offer Salesforce's CRM (customer relationship management) applications with integrated Google Apps.

The companies on Monday announced that Salesforce.com's customers now have the option of using versions of Google Apps, Gmail, Calendar, and Google Talk that are tightly linked to Salesforce.com (see Techmeme for more coverage).

What does that mean? An e-mail response from a customer can be appended to the customer information stored within … Read more

How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine.

Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google's cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google's infrastructure:

What … Read more

Google shares info on suspected pedophiles

It wasn't immediately clear from Thursday's reports, but Google will indeed share information from its Orkut social-networking site with Brazilian authorities trying to deal with suspected pedophiles.

On Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate ordered Google to share information on 3,261 suspected pedophiles, information Google had refused to share earlier. No more.

"Google Brazil is legally obligated to comply with this order, and it is Google's policy to comply with valid judicial process," spokeswoman Sara Jew-lim said in a statement Friday.

Google already had tools in place to allow users to flag potentially illegal content, and … Read more