The Web Services Report

As you may remember, in Microsoft's most recent round of layoffs, the company laid off Director of Business Development Don Dodge. Dodge is very respected in the start-up community and tirelessly defended Microsoft's technologies at conferences and to developers during his time at the company. When he was let go, many people were shocked by the move and were watching intently to see who would pick him up. On Monday, Dodge announced on his blog that he will be joining Google in a similar capacity to his role at Microsoft.

Now, Dodge will focus on evangelizing Google's technologies and platforms, instead of Microsoft's, to the developer community. Dodge said that within 90 minutes of the news of his layoff becoming public, Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering (who also came from Microsoft), contacted him about this job opportunity with the company. On his blog, Dodge claims that he has already switched over to Gmail, Google Apps, and Chrome from their Microsoft counterparts.

It's great to see that Dodge landed on his feet so quickly after being ousted from his position at Microsoft and he will likely be a great asset to Google in dealing with the developer community.

Google is notoriously slow and calculating about changing it the user interface of its services.

In fact, Google hasn't made any major changes to the look and feel of Google Maps since its launch in 2005.

On Friday, the company launched several refinements to Maps--the biggest changes to its look since launch. While you might not notice these changes immediately--unless you are a hardcore Google Maps user--they are designed to enhance the readability of the maps.

As seen above, the thick street outlines that can make maps harder to read have been eliminated.

Google describes the update here:

(L)ocal and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colors have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map. Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.

The L.A. Times and now, Mashable are reporting that a security hole in Twitter allows protected tweets to be indexed by Google. After looking into the matter, we have determined that Google is not displaying protected tweets but rather indexing all public tweets, some from accounts that are now protected.

At first glance, there seems to be a hole in Twitter's protected tweet security, with the prime example being tweets, supposedly written by Bill Clinton showing up on the search engine. However, the tweets that appear here belong to "Fake Bill Clinton" from when he owned the @billclinton username and the account was private. One of the tweets that is indexed by Google under @billclinton can be found, migrated to @notbillclinton's account here.

It appears that all Twitter users whose accounts have been protected since they opened them are in no danger of their tweets being indexed. It appears that if, at some point, the profile was public, then the tweets made during that time continue to live in Google's index.

This incident was definitely a scare for users with protected accounts who value their privacy on the site highly and have placed some degree of trust in Twitter to keep their tweets safe. Twitter has had some security concerns in the past, with a slew of their corporate documents being exposed and before that with several high-profile accounts being hacked. Since the "protected tweets exposed" fiasco is essentially a non-issue, it appears that Twitter has the service's security under control for the time being. Privacy and trust are big issues for companies like Twitter and had this been a real issue, surely many users would have felt betrayed.

The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.

Google Wave's Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, "Google Wave" is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) bragging about receiving their invitations and not surprisingly, others begging for one.

The eBay economy for Google Wave invites has been pretty healthy, with some fetching upward of $80 to $100. This big influx of new invitees, all with 8 invitations each, will probably eliminate a lot of the demand for Wave invites on eBay, much like what happened with Gmail invites.

Google Wave will start to become a lot more valuable once more users get access to the site. It seems that Google is trying to roll out Wave to people as quickly as the service will allow, so the wait for those of you who haven't been lucky enough to snag an invite yet hopefully shouldn't be too bad. How many of you have been included in this recent wave (couldn't resist) of invites so far?

Google Docs' summer interns this summer were tasked with working on improvements and additions to the service geared toward students.

The results of their work, now available to try out, include new features such as an equation editor, superscripts and subscripts, document translation, improvements to surveys, and more outlining options.

While none of these features is groundbreaking on its own, collectively, they help round out Google's productivity suite, fulfilling some specific needs that probably prevented some from using the service.

A lot of people complain about the minimal feature set of Google Docs, as compared to market leader Microsoft Office, which got a 16-year head start on Google's offering and is sometimes criticized for being feature-cluttered. Students comprise one of the core groups of users and potential users of Docs, so it makes sense to build out the feature set to support the kinds of word-processing, spreadsheet-tweaking, and presentation-building tasks that they typically need to perform.

Web pages have long included anchor links, which, when clicked, send you to a specific section of the page. Wikipedia uses them heavily to help users jump between headings and navigate the sometimes large articles more efficiently. Google has announced that it is now including these anchor links in search results. This is right in line with Google's mission of helping users to find the information that they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible.

For an example of how this works, try searching for "nuclear fusion." As you can see, Google pulls out the headings in the article, so if I was really interested in the requirements for nuclear fusion, I could jump straight there. This is a great addition and really helps in cases where you are dealing with long, text-heavy pages.

If you are a Webmaster and want to set up your Web pages to identify sections to Google, then read this post on Google's Webmaster Central to get you started.

As if this week wasn't already stressful enough on Wall Street, at the end of Tuesday trading, Google's stock dropped over 200 points to $249, due to what the Nasdaq is calling "erroneous orders." The share price has since rebounded to $415 in after-hours trading. According to a comment from the Nasdaq to Reuters, "Transactions at or above $425.29 and at or below $400.52, that were executed between 3:57 p.m. and 4:02 p.m. EST, would be wiped out." That means that those who may have cashed in on this error are going to be out of luck.

Even though the situation is being rectified, this incident has certainly caused even more uneasiness in already shaken investors.

When Google Chrome was released a week ago, I bravely volunteered to use the browser exclusively for the next seven days. That means no Firefox, no IE, no Opera, only Chrome, with no exceptions. I was fully expecting a week of frustrations, incompatibilities, and annoyances. I was ready to criticize all of the fatal flaws that were sure to turn up. I am happy to say that I was wrong. Google Chrome passes the full-time use test with flying colors.

(You can get Chrome from CNET Download.com.)

One of the first things that people notice when they load up Google Chrome is the gigantic viewing window. Chrome's presentation is very elegant, with the larger than usual viewing window, beautiful animations, browser bar that searches, suggests, and shows history, and a good-looking and highly functional start page. Page searches also show the locations in which your search terms appear in the scroll bar. Surfing has been way easier on my eyes in the past week.

As everyone else has mentioned, Chrome is really snappy when using Google apps. Gmail and Google Reader work like a dream. Loading each tab in its own process also makes a difference. If you are in the middle of something important, a balky page or Flash element in a different tab doesn't crash everything. During my entire test of Chrome, there was only one instance when the whole browser started choking, but it was able to pull itself out of it. Chrome certainly showed nothing like the crashing issues that pop up with Firefox (although they have been made better with Firefox 3).

The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper if you are a Hotmail user. It seems like this is an easily correctable issue and probably not the fault of Google. Chrome also suffers from the same insanely annoying bug as Firefox, where Flash videos sometimes stop after two seconds.

The thing I missed the most by switching from Firefox to Chrome for the week is the absence of my Remember The Milk todo list in Gmail. Google is promising extensions for Chrome, but doesn't support them yet, so you lose a lot of the functionality that Firefox's extensions provide.

All in all, my experience with Chrome was very positive and it really did not give me any major difficulties. I see Google Chrome potentially winning over some of Firefox's users, especially if they add extensions and get support from the developer community.

Chrome is more than a bright and shiny Google lab experiment. It's a useful browser that is going to steal share from the existing products.

Google's Chrome browser is outperforming the latest "stable" builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. The Acid test, for those who do not know, tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. While all three browsers pass the Acid2 test, Chrome currently clocks in at 78 out of 100 on Acid3, while Firefox and IE7 stand at 71 and 14 respectively. The only release quality build to beat Chrome is Opera, which scores an 83.

Even though Google has the stable builds edged out, we have to remember that Chrome is still in development, where it is topped by a number of other "unstable," development builds, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100). It is interesting that the Safari 4 Developer Preview performs so much better than Chrome, given that they are both built on Apple's WebKit framework.

Whenever a new browser or an update to a browser is released, one of the first things that techies tend to look at is how it fares on the Acid test. The latest iteration of the test, Acid3, is the hardest yet and no "stable" browser builds have achieved a 100 out of 100 on the test, although the Safari 4 Developer Preview has.

Passing the Acid3 test is an important goal for browser developers and it's great to see that Chrome is performing so well on its first attempt.

Update:
A reader, Benjamin, writes in saying that under Vista SP1, Chrome shows scores ranging from 74 to 79 on the Acid3 test. Running it again right now, the test showed a score of a 79. Some of the initial variability could have been due to the servers for the Acid3 test being hammered as a result of Chrome's release.