A recent article on Mashable reported that Google’s Chrome web browser has overtaken the 3rd spot in browser popularity.  This pushes Apple’s Safari back to 4th place.  Take a look at this graphic depicting market share between Safari and Chrome:

[image courtesy TheAppleBlog]

Some say it was a matter of time and I agree with them.  Google’s products are often raved over.  Most Google products are compatible with both PC’s and Macs.   This is because they are web-based apps like Google Docs, Google Voice etc.

Apple’s Safari browser is strongly associated with Apple and the Mac, for good reason.  That’s their browser, much like Microsoft’s Explorer.

Explorer has been tarnished with laggy performance and security holes all of which has been well publicized.  The public has lost trust in the pre-loaded browser, not to mention it has been stalled in innovation and keeping up with web standards.  What are PC users suppose to do?  Download the ‘arch-rival’ browser to the nemesis known as Apple?  Of course not!  It probably doesn’t even cross their mind as an option.  That leaves the highly popular Mozilla Firefox as the ‘fallback’ browser.  Firefox has become a huge success since its release in 2004.

There are two things users care about from their browser: speed and security.  This is something Firefox delivers on both fronts, but now they have new competition on their heels with Google Chrome.  Chrome is simple to use, the fastest browser confirmed in independent tests and also the most secure.  What could be causing this rapid gain in market share for the new browser?

Netbooks, plain and simple.  Anyone with half a brain will not use IE on their new netbook.  So they then consider Mozilla Firefox.  There is a problem; Firefox is very harsh on resources and doesn’t run the best on netbooks.  Where does that leave you?  Google Chrome!  It’s lightweight on resources and ultra-fast and secure.  The netbook explosion has definitely helped Chrome become a major player in the browser market.  With no end in sight to the netbook craze, Chrome will continue its upward swing in market share.

Google is acquiring companies like I acquire candy on Halloween.  This raises some big questions like; is Google getting too big for itself?  They seem to be on a path to become another Microsoft or Apple, yea that big!  Let’s take a look at their latest reason to salivate, Yelp!

Yelp! is a community of restaurant/food fanatics who upload user reviews of eateries and restaurants.  From Bob’s Steaks just down the road to the most classy restaurants in New York City.

• Larry Dignan at ZDNet. Dignan predicts a dark scenario if the deal goes through: “See where this is going? Google is your friendly neighborhood local business gatekeeper. Google is already the gatekeeper for the big guys. The Google is a local content Borg. Resistance is futile. So is innovation. Any threat these days gets acquired.”

Larry brings up a valid point.  Google is becoming such a dominant force could it stifle innovation in the areas they are involved in?  Any start-up with any promise that could run with the big boys gets sucked up and purchased by Google.  Does this sound familiar?  Microsoft anyone?

David Coursey of PC World even published an article inserting the idea of Apple and Microsoft teaming up to take on Google.  I’m not the only one seeing the GOOG as a threat, am I?

I will be the first to admit I love Google.  They are one of the biggest and best tech companies in the world bar none. Their innovation, products, business ideals are all fantastic.  I use many Google products including, search, e-mail, maps, docs, wave, voice etc.  You name it, I probably use it.

Do we blame Google for their dominance and great business sense to this point?  Or do we blame everyone else who can’t step up and compete with Google?  I’m not sure which way the tide would go on that question.

Everyone is worried about the H1N1 flu this season.  This already in addition to the regular flu strain that kills thousands every year.  Google developed this trending product to track the spread of flu worldwide.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. — Google Flu Trends

How accurate is it?  Good question.  I’ll let this graphic speak for itself.

This should be an interesting year to track the flu.  It is worth a bookmark in your browser.

Check out Google Flu Trends

UW-Stout has announced it has selected Microsoft’s Live@edu product to provide e-mail for students.  The choice will save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the University while providing the students a better e-mail system.  The aging campus-based e-mail server would have cost about $300,000 dollars to replace over a three year span.

The big draw for students will be increased storage capacity.  The top problem students encounter every single year is filling up their mailbox with messages.  So many of us today are use to unlimited storage of our data.  ‘Delete Message’, what’s that?  Services like G-mail offer the ability to keep a running archive of every electronic conversation you engage in.  The risk associated with that luxury is your e-mail is only stored in the cloud, not on your hard drive.  That is what makes so many nervous.  If the ‘cloud’ goes down, then what?  Oh my godddddd!!!!

Some administrators at other campuses cite the recent G-mail outage that occurred for one-half of a business day as a reason to stay away from cloud-based e-mail.  Really?  Do you think your universities IT department has the technology, hardware and abilities to that of Google?  Your out of your mind if you think your better off just because the server is on your campus.  Google maintains a 99.9% up-time, and that figured isn’t carefully crafted with formulas and exceptions to make it seem amazing.  It is real 99.9% up-time.  What service can even approach saying that truthfully?  Not many.

There is no question universities are afraid to ‘lose control’ over their e-mail system; a life blood of any university, especially UW-Stout.  Companies like Google and Microsoft can provide better solutions than any university IT department in the country.  Google has some of the best network infrastructure in the world.  Why not utilize the power of their technology for your students benefits?

These positives do come with risks like:

• Network outage possibilities
• Glitches in the network (See Brown University Google Glitch)
• Difficulties complying with ‘Open Record’ laws.

Microsoft Live@edu rolls out on-campus today.  I’m anxious to see the new product and all of its features.  I’ll post a follow up blog with how the transition is going here and my thoughts on using the Microsoft product first hand.

Tragic news broke Thursday afternoon as Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Jackson left many fans heart broken across the globe as he took a great deal of talent and mystery to the grave.  He almost took something else with him as well, the Internet.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

I hear so much debate from people about Twitter.  Is it a fad?  Will it be gone in two years?  Will it explode with ‘facebook type’ exponential growth?  I think it safe to say that Twitter is perched atop or just nanometers shy of the peak of Gartners famous hype cycle.  Those who ask these questions need to look at what Twitter does on a more macro level.  Use from the likes of The Weather Channel, CNN  and small T.V. markets nationwide Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and his staff probably felt that gaining visibility and users was the hard part.  The reality is the hard part has just started.

Twitter has taken the mainstream by storm from Oprah, The Colbert Show, CNN and even Barack Obama.  Twitter will now suffer the plunge into what is known as the trough of disillusionment.  This occurs when a technology fails to meet expectations and it quickly becomes unfashionable, therefore leading to less media attention and public visibility.  The product itself, Twitter, is starting to slide down into this trough.  Will its benefits become widely demonstrated?  Will it stabilize?  You can make your predictions as you will, but Twitter has offered up something more to the world.  Real-time communication that is customizable, social and search-able.  Leo LaPorte of TWiT.tv has stated that Twitter is not real-time because you need to ‘refresh’ the page to see updates comments.  I would say this is a small technicality.  Aggregater services like FriendFeed are ‘truly’ real-time where updates come in as they are pushed to FriendFeed’s servers and appear with no action required from the user.

Twitter has pushed this social real-time connectivity to the mainstream like no other platform, even leading monsters like Facebook to follow suit by re-designing their users homepage.  Even Google has been working on what many call a possible revolutionary platform known as Wave.  Wave provides real-time communications and may very well re-invent how we communicate online in the long haul.

Twitter as a company may have been the catalyst to mainstream the idea, but it won’t be the last as other tech giants and new start-ups take aim on real-time communications.  This is only the beginning as we embark on another shift on the Internet.  Another question to ponder is; are these new ‘real-time communications’ tools considered web 3.0?  Ahh, let’s not even go there!

Google Inc. is one of those companies that makes you wish you would have listened to Uncle Jeff when he told you he knew of a sure fire hot start-up.  Ever wonder how it all came to be?   Here is a short and painless history lesson.

1995

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during this first meeting.

1996

• Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
• BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year — eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.

1997

• Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google — a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

1998

August

• Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn’t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.

September

• Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
• Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company’s name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim’s check.
• Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he’s a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.

December

• “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

2003

September

• Google News launches with 4000 news sources.

2005

February

• We hit a milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed.
• Google Maps goes live

Source:  Google Inc.

Google is the dominant force on the Internet, especially when it comes to search engines.   They now have nearly 60% of the market share when it comes to search engines, that is a commanding stance.  Here you will find a graphic showing their stock price from the time they went public in 2004.

It may have all of your e-mail (Gmail), your appointments (Google Calendar) and even your last known location (Google Latitude). It may know what you’re watching (YouTube) and whom you are calling. It may have transcripts of your telephone messages (Google Voice).

It may hold your photos in Picasa Web Albums, which includes face-recognition technology that can automatically identify you and your friends in new photos. And through Google Books, it may know what books you’ve read, what you annotated and how long you spent reading. (Computer World)

Literally, if you used many of the popular Google owned web tools, Google could provide one amazingly accurate and scary profile on you.  How Google uses personal information is guided by three “bedrock principles,” says Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel. “We don’t sell it. We don’t collect it without permission. We don’t use it to serve ads without permission.” But what constitutes “personal information” has not been universally agreed upon.  So what you may see as private information, Google may not.

Does this mean you should shut off your Gmail, cancel your Orkut and flush your G1 cell phone down the toilet?  Hardly.  Google continues operations on the basis of trust, similar to another data giant like Facebook.  People know their data is being archived and stored on Googles servers but they trust the corporation will make the correct ethical decision.  However, not all are so trusting.  Google received a lot of criticism over its toolbar that integrates in your web browser.  It’s not just a convenient way to search the web, it reports your surfing habits which Google shares to third party companies and clients.  However, none of the data is linked to personally identifiable information about the user.

Bob Cringely of PBS says this about what Google is up to, “The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.”

I think Mr. Cringely is a little far fetched and paranoid.  Google’s entire business model flows around packets, bits and bytes being shot from A to B.  Their life blood, their very foundation of success is their computing power and server capacity.  Investments in such technology in crucial areas that provide the best chance at un-interruptible power seems quite logical.

Is Google preparing a global take over?  Not likely.  But it will be very interesting to watch them grow and progress in the next few years.

14% of Google’s user base experienced extremely slow services or none at all for about 90 minutes this week.  Google cited a server error began routing traffic through their servers and Russia consequently overloading it causing slow traffic or unavailable error messages.

Can you imagine trying to 50% of all of Googles packets through one server farm? No wonder my Gmail slowed down!

The outage occurred at 9:45am to about 11:20pm Central time in the United States.  The outage quickly made ripples on twitter and became known as #googlefail.

Google prides itself on reliability.  Imagine if an important business document was saved on Google Docs and you could not access it any other way, or your entire calendar for work is on Google and not synced with Outlook.  This little hiccup likely caused lost productivity, profits and lots of headaches around the world.

Really makes me re-analyze how much stock I put into online web tools and applications, though I have the utmost faith in Google.  (Bows down on knees in submission to ‘The Google’)

Rupert Murdoch, a powerful force in media.  He went on capitol hill this week to talk about the future of journalism.  What I learned after watching the proceedings on CNN.com, he still just doesn’t get it.  Though he is a major investor in the Internet, he really doesn’t under the transition we are in the midst of.  This new thing being quickly branded as the ‘interactive’ web vs. the old ‘read-only’ web from the 1990’s. 

Rupert Murdoch felt it was a good idea to attack Google on capitol hill by saying, “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?  Thanks, but no thanks” said Murdoch. 

Some have suggested to ease on looking at Murdoch as a ‘media dinosaur’, I would have to disagree.  Someone else’s biography of Murdoch will not change my opinion on his business decisions and statements on important stages. 

Google is the aggregator for news, I mean Google runs the world right?  With the newspaper industry fallinginto bankruptcy literally everyday, Murdoch is looking to latch onto the pockets of a giant and slap their hands until they give up some of their grip or money.  I doubt Google will do either! 

Murdoch should know that he can easily stop Google crawlers from indexing his newspapers webpages, it is a simple line of text in his robots.txt file instructing Google not to index the page.  Sounds so simple right?  Not so fast.

If Murdoch were to stop having Google index his newspapers, suddenly the Wall Street Journal disappears but his competition is still readily indexing with Google.   Therefore, that percentage of the demographic that uses Google News (and it is quite large) will just click through to his competitors.  Readers don’t care about who they get it from, they want it now and they want content that is easy to find. 

That is why Murdoch won’t do anything until he can get the entire industry to follow.  The common ‘one goes against, he fails.  One gets everyone to go against they prevail’ kind of perspective. 

It comes down to this Rupert.  You need to deliver to the expectations of consumers.  Downward spiralling reporting and absolutely rigid non-conformity to trends in the industry and now you want to complain.  What were you doing five years ago?   Consumers will not pay for dribble, especially since you can find it through out millions of pages on the Internet.  The newspaper’s in this country need to radically restructure under new business models or force certain death in the long-run. 

And yes, that includes restructuring their content and methods of delivery!

Evaluate, re-structure or face certain death!  (cheesy accent)