It looks like Google is on an acquisition kick again — just a week ago, Google snapped up “Zingku” and today “Jaiku“. Jaiku is similar to Twitter — but it has a fairly small user-base comparatively. Keeping track of your friends, and pushing your own presence with services like these is fun, easy, and becoming more widely used.

we’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Jaiku is happy about the acquisition too — if it doesn’t turn out like Dodgeball, they will hopefully see a spike in their user base, and Orkut users will rejoice.

While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation.

I have been relatively quiet on rumors about GPhone — mostly because I don’t agree with them. Speculation of an “iPhone killer” created by Google has been in the headlines without, from what I can tell, reliable sources or proof of any kind. It doesn’t make sense for Google to create a mobile phone — at most, I would say to look out for an operating system.

I know, this doesn’t sound as exciting as a killer phone, but think of it like this — if Google has it their way, the fruits of their hard work will make its way into phones of all makes and models instead of just a single device created by them. And today that suspicion was somewhat verified in an article by the New York Times which talks of an operating system to rival Windows Mobile.

Microsoft makes loads of money licensing Windows Mobile to cell phone manufacturers — a business model that works when you either have no competition, or your product blows anything in your space away. In the spirit of how Google likes to play, they would likely say to manufacturers: “Here you go, have this operating system that your users will love, and don’t bother paying us for it”.

All of a sudden, the GPhone operating system sounds like a no-brainer and will start cropping up on phones everywhere. Conceivably, devices loaded with the GPhone OS will be cheaper due to the free/cheap license given to the manufacturers. As it stands already, even Palm is shipping their Treo with either the native PalmOS or Windows Mobile — what is stopping them from providing a third alternative?

What do you think? Take the poll!

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The newest version of Google Desktop, released today, finally lets you take sidebar-native gadgets onto the web — effectively making them universal. Until now, you were only able to use web-based gadgets in the sidebar, but not the other way around.

When installing a gadget that was originally designed for the sidebar for the first time, users will be prompted to download a browser extension to handle the non-web code. This was the final step they needed to take in order to make gadgets truly universal.

Here is the complete list of updates you will find in the latest version of Google Desktop:

• New Gadgets on the Web functionality
• Improved Outlook indexing and search
• Updated Quick Search Box
• Simplified Install Process
• Fixed installation and auto-update issues on Vista
• Various bug fixes and optimizations

One gripe I have with Google Apps for enterprise use is the lack of control companies have over their data. If an email isn’t delivered or something happened to an email account by accident, the administrator can do nothing but say “I will send Google a message and I will let you know what they say”. I know from experience that an answer like that does nothing but frustrate end users and make them want Exchange.

Well, Google took a huge step forward in that department today. Enterprise users (the ones that spend $50/year/account) now have access to the powerful features of Postini through the Google Apps dashboard. Postini was acquired by Google earlier this year, and at the time we wondered if it would be available as a free feature for Google Apps — turns out that only paying customers and those signed up for the education package can take advantage of it.

I know I would be more willing to pay $4/month/account for Google Apps now that I have access to Postini. There are always users who actually believe Gmail “isn’t working” and everything would be perfect if they just had Exchange (even though 99% of the time their problems can be attributed to user error). Now, on a per-user basis, you can easily route messages to alternate mail servers — like Exchange if you must. That is just one small example that illustrates how Postini can make an email administrators life much easier.

In addition to Postini, Google is now offering 25 gigabytes of storage per account too. This much space should satisfy even the users who use email the most within an organization. What do you think? Is Google Apps becoming a more viable enterprise solution? Is it ready to compete with Exchange yet?

The Attributor blog posted their take on what might be taking Google so long for them to push their “Claim Your Content” service out the door. “This is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken”, says Steve Chen of YouTube. The service is to allow creators of content — with the focus on YouTube video content at first — to make sure there are no unauthorized copies of their content being distributed.

Here are some of the challenges the Attributor has identified that may be causing the delay if they are focusing on “doing it right”:

• Removal from main Google index - Not only do they have to remove YouTube videos from their Univeral Search engine, the same videos hosted on other sites, which also appear in search results, should also be removed.
• Removal from the AdSense network - If a video in violation of copyright infringement is removed from YouTube, Google can still monetize it by means of AdSense ads found on a third party website hosting the video. Shouldn’t Google be forced to remove AdSense ads from pages hosting infringing content?
• Other forms of content - Video is one challenge, but what about images and text? It might not be on their top priority list, but if they are serious about the “Claim Your Content” service, it should extend to all media types — each of which present their own challenges.

The list doesn’t stop there, there are more points in this article. This system has completely missed its deadline, and with each passing month, it feels more like waiting for a version of Microsoft Windows to be released than a typically premature “beta” Google service.

Google does take privacy seriously — and in many respects, they are more conscious about their privacy practices than most other companies because they are an easy target. It is also assuring that they can fix vulnerabilities very quickly in most cases. That said, it is becoming very concerning that cross site scripting (XSS) attacks on Google services have become a common headline in the news recently. We only hear about the holes that are publicly disclosed — but you can bet there are many others that go unreported and are abused without you or Google even knowing.

XSS is a technique that hackers use to inject code into a website that can expose things like your browser cookies to them. Stolen cookies can be used to hijack your browser session allowing attackers to look at personal data or, depending on the severity of the vulnerability, it may even allow them to gain complete access to your accounts.

Does this affect you? Yes, it can affect anyone — all you have to do to be taken advantage of is visit a website. Even one that you normally trust can be dangerous because one line of malicious code that is invisible to the user (likely inserted by a hacker) can put all visitors to that site at risk without the owner even knowing.

Your data is not completely safe on Google until they implement an effective internal preemptive XSS discovery team, and Google related XSS attacks stop making headlines. Google needs to hire full time employees, who have a knack for discovering these vulnerabilities, to kill bugs before products are even released. Obviously the automated tools they are developing alone aren’t foolproof.

I know XSS is far from limited to Google, but if they want to be known as your friendly neighborhood privacy protector, they have to do more than just talk about it. Perhaps even an anti-XSS feature that checks for suspicious URL patterns in the Google Toolbar would be a nice addition.

In the mean time, if you are worried about your privacy, download Firefox and the NoScript addon. It’s the only sure-fire way to keep your information private for now.

Google has acquired Zingku, a little known Boston startup that touts their mobile social platform targeted at teens to twenty-somethings. New signups for the service have been frozen since Google announced the acquisition — but current account holders will not see any change in service if they want to keep their account.

What does Zingku actually do though? Well, the only information I have is from their website — and it’s not particularly helpful. By the sound of it though, Zingku takes full advantage of SMS — making it easy for anyone who has a mobile phone to participate. This SMS service integrates with their companion browser-based service to make it easy to share things with other people in your network. Unlike most social services, instead of developing a website and adding a mobile layer on top, they created the social service with mobile devices being their targeted platform from the beginning.

Our service is designed from the mobile phone, outward, allowing you to create and exchange things of interest ranging from invitations to “mobile flyers” with friends in a trusted manner. On the mobile phone, Zingku uses standard text messaging features that come with every phone. On the web, our service uses your standard web browser and instant messenger. There is nothing to install.

Google has been pushing out services that not only function, but function well, on mobile devices at a faster rate than ever before. This is just another example of how serious Google is when it comes to mobile applications.

Rumor has it that Google may be getting rid of the elusive, but very important PageRank — that friendly green status bar on the Google Toolbar that website owners try to build up. PageRank is what made Google’s search results as good as they are — it is one of the many factors that help the search engine determine how to rank results.

The webmasters at Digital Point want some clarification though. It’s been far too long since the last “Pagerank toolbar export” happened, and that doesn’t sit will with people who put effort into building links.

We, the webmasters at Digitalpoint and I think thousands, even millions of other SEO enthusiasts are wondering when will the next Pagerank toolbar export take place?

As we put a lot of work into link building and making our sites better all the time, toolbar Pagerank is very important to us;

but this is the longest delay ever. Furthermore, nobody knows what will happen to Pagerank.

So Google, please be so kind and tell us what’s going on and when the next estimated FULL update is coming! Is Google dropping the toolbar pagerank for good?

Perhaps Google is starting to incorporate Orion — the search algorithm invented by Australian student, Ori Allon, and snatched up by Google. When the news first broke, Ori said he expected the algorithm to be complete within 18 months. How long ago was that? Oh, about 18 months ago.

It seems as though Gmail Mobile went through a serious update within the last day. The previous mobile version was quite ugly and pretty much makes you want to stay away. The new version is true to the spirit of Gmail with an intuitive interface and a nice clean layout.

This comes the same day Google announced the iPhone version of Google Calendar. It looks like Google is getting deeper and deeper into developing applications that belong on mobile devices — it’s too bad data plans, at least in Canada, will run you about $100 a month.

[Thanks David, Google Operating System]

Google just launched a new version of Google Calendar specifically designed for the iPhone. To check it out, visit the calendar.google.com from your iPhone browser, or download the Firefox addon that lets you update your UserAgent to make websites think you are using one.

Google Calendar for the iPhone is quite simple and is a lot easier to use than the normal mobile interface. Here is a screenshot:

Gooogle Reader for iPhone
The second unannounced application for the iPhone is Google Reader. Again, it is much sexier than the original mobile interface for the service. It has a distinct iPhone feel and I’m sure it will be used often by iPhone users. This comes after Google made a version of Google Reader for the Wii that makes good use of the Wiimote.

Google seems to be launching iPhone apps left and right — maybe the actual search engine or Gmail will be next? To give the new iPhone interface a try, download “User Agent Switcher” for Firefox and change your user agent temporarily to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

[via Gmail blog]