Google made a big announcement today. The announced Google Buzz. In case you missed the announcement, see the Google video below:

Google’s Super Bowl Ad. Well Done.

On New Year’s Eve 1999 I was at work in the client services area trying to check computer systems to make sure nothing blew up and we had done all the Y2K patching that we needed to do in order for our computer systems to survive. We all know 10 years later that Y2K came and went with a yawn and the rest of the decade started off amazing with all the technical innovations that were to come. Below is a list of some of them and how much I use them as part of my everyday life:

1. The IPhone

Their is no question that the IPhone has become the smart phone of choice for me. It has become a daily part of my life for making phone calls, running applications and even browsing the web on the go. I use the Iphone regularly even to listen to music.

2.0 LCD Technology

On my computer desk and on my wife’s computer desk we both have 22inch LCD monitors. In past if you bought a tube monitor it would have taken have a desk to put them on. In my living room I have a 40 Inch LCD TV. Imagine having a 42Inch Tube TV. IT would be huge.

The other key besides the size is the price. LCD technology is dropping by the day and they have become very affordable.

3.0 Twitter

Twitter has become of the most important mediums in my social media basket. I use Twitter on a daily basis at home and on the go. I have met many friends, associates and potential clients on Twitter. I often use Twitter to keep up on what is going on in the world. News travels quick on Twitter.

4.0 Digital Camera Technology

When the decade started, digital camera’s had just hit the 3 Mega Pixel point. Today I shoot with a Kodak M380 which is a 10.2 Mega Pixel point and shoot camera with a 5 times Optical Zoom. The amazing part is I paid well under 200 dollars for it.

6.0 High Speed Internet

Hight speed Internet has exploded in the last decade. It has become cheaper and faster. Currently in Toronto you can get DSL speeds of up to 6Meg per second and cable up to 50 Meg per second. Currently I have Rogers cable at 25 Meg per second. This is amazing when it was not that long ago we were all on dial-up.

7.0 Google

In the last 10 years Google has gone from a tiny internet startup site to King of the net. I now use Google for search, email, social networking, picture storage and so on. Their is no question Google has popularized the Internet as well as made it easier for people to use. Google has become the King of search and has made a profit doing it.

8.0 Friend Feed

Friend Feed is a social media service that has amazing real time discussion capabilities. It also aggregates content to and from other services. For a long time, Friend Feed was the service which most of the geeks hung out on. Their real time capabilities were so good that Facebook has bough them recently and integrated real time feed capabilities into it’s service.

9.0 Facebook

Facebook has turned into one of the biggest services in the last 10 years. Facebook has become the communication point for many friends, colleagues and social media people. Most companies and news sources are also now on Facebook. It has become too large a community to ignore.

10.0 Twit.TV

In 2005 Tech TV in the States closed down and Leo Laporte created the Twit.TV podcast network. Twit.tv has podcasts currently on every topic from Google to Home Theater. Currently I am listening to 5 to 6 podcasts from Leo’s network on a weekly basis. The podcasts help make my commute to and from work relaxing, productive and more informative.

I know their are many more innovations in the last decade. It is really an exiting time to be working in Social Media/Technology. Let’s hope the next Decade is just as good as the last one.

The Google/Microsoft Rivalry has started another round with Google release of Google Chrome O/S. It is another page the historic battle between these two companies. The Google Chrome O/S has been release to take aim at the ever expanding Netbook market. Will Google make major in rounds time will tell. Let’s take a look back at the historical battle between these two companies and my take on them.

1. Google Vs Bing

On the Internet search is king. This makes Google king on the Internet since they dominate search. Google has the majority of the search business. Microsoft’s bing is picking up shares in search but slowly. It will take them time. But for now this battle is to Google.

2. Windows Live Offerings vs Google Online Offerings.

Personally I believe Google wins this battle at this point. Google Docs, Gmail, Picasa Web Albums are all easier to use then their Microsoft counterparts. These services integrate well with each other as well. Microsoft has been a good attempt with Live Mesh, Movie Maker, Live Mail and Windows Photo Gallery but in my opinion it is a little too late. Ironic when you think Bill Gate’s vision was for the Internet to be an extension of the desktop. This battle goes to Google.

3. Android vs Windows Mobile

Anything is better than Window’s Mobile. I had a Windows Mobile Device for over a year and hated it. Android device’s have many applications available for it and the phone’s are much more reliable. Windows Mobile is hard to use – no cut and paste and really slow. – This one to Google.

4. Google Chrome vs Internet Explorer.

Google Chrome is a much faster and easier browser to use than Internet Explorer. Since Chrome does not use Active X it is prone to the same security exploits as Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has most of the market but that is because it is bundled with Windows. If it were not bundled with Windows, it would never do as well as it has.

Winner: Tie

5. Office vs Google Docs

Microsoft Office is a far more powerful desktop suite then the cloud based Google Docs. Microsoft Office, despite it’s hefty price tag is still king in the business environment for now. The product is far superior and more robust to Google Docs. If I was looking for an alternative based on price alone I would look at Open Office before I looked at Google Docs. Google Docs needs major work on all front’s if it is going to content especially with Microsoft Office moving to the cloud in 2010.

The winner here is Microsoft.

6. Google Chrome OS Vs Windows.

Last week Google released it’s Chrome O/S. My first looks clearly show that this operating system is not ready for prime time. The operating system comes with all kinds of promises claiming it is the Windows killer. If I was looking for a Linix based Operating system (I do run one), I would turn to the stable Ubuntu. Chrome is really a badly repacked Linux distribution for now. It remains to be seen if the developer’s will latch on the Chrome – Time will tell.

Windows 7 is the best operating system which Microsoft has ever put out. It is stable, mature and complete. The public will soon forget about Windows Vista and realize how good Windows 7 really is.

The Winner here is Microsoft.

Conclusions

If you look at the above 6 categories, their is a trend between these two heavyweights in the industry. Google dominates the cloud based services, Microsoft dominates the PC and Desktop. Microsoft needs to shift it’s strategy toward’s more cloud based application and I believe has started to do this with the release of Office 2010 next year.

In the last week I made two big moves in my personal computing universe. The moves all concern Google. One will shock readers of my blog and the other one probably will not.

For the last year I have used a Microsoft Exchange Server on my web hosting provider as my email back end. This past week I moved my email back end from an exchange server to a Google Gmail back end. The big question is why would I do this? Their are several reasons I moved my email. They include cost, cloud integration, security and consolidation.

Cost is the easiest one to talk about. I was paying 1and1 $7.00 a month x 2 for two hosted exchange accounts for Kelli and I. That translates into a $14.00 per month, $168 per year. This does not count the conversion from US to Canadian Dollars since I live in Toronto. Gmail is free:)

Cloud Integration makes the perfect sense. I have been moving a lot of things I do to Internet/Cloud based applications over the last while. The Cloud is the future do to portability. I can access my data anywhere via my Iphone, my home pc, my IPhone, my friends pc you name it. I live such a busy lifestyle that portability and data accessibility are is major issues for me. Having my data in the Cloud works well and email is no exception.

Security is a good one. A lot of people will argue that Microsoft Exchange is more secure than Gmail. I should first off indicate that security does not just include login in security but also security from viruses and worms. Microsoft Exchange is prone to Active X based viruses. By not using Exchange/IE I am not at the same risk for email viruses. It should also be noted that Gmail has better junk mail filters than Microsoft Exchange. As a result you are not prone to as much junk mail as you got before.

Consolidation is an easy one to talk about. Google is one of of the King’s on the internet. I already use Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa on line, Google Search, Google Reader and soon to be Google Wave. All these services are integrated and use the same Google Id which makes my life real easy. Since the services are Integrated they work very well together as well.

I had mentioned their as a second thing I did last week. I have now made the latest release of Google Chrome my number 1 Internet browser. All the flash problems have been fixed so it makes life much easier. Google Chrome is now faster for the web services I use. Firefox seems to run slower. Chrome’s seamless integration with Google services make it a even more attractive browser to use.

In the last week the move to Google Gmail and Google Chrome has made my Internet experience a much faster experience.

In cloud computing their is one real dominate company in the market. That dominate company is Google. Google started out as a search company but today they are the masters of the cloud and offer many great cloud applications. They are in social media,email and even word processing.

A lot of this technology Google has not developed. What they have done is purchase companies which have developed great technology and re-branded it as their own.

Google has many great offerings as follows:

1. Gmail
Gmail is Google’s killer application. This is their email client which can be accessed from anywhere. The
nice thing about gmail is it support’s many different platforms. Gmail is available on a traditional pc as well
as Windows Mobile, The IPhone, The Blackberry and the Android.

What helps with Gmail is that you can sync your data from the cloud with your mobile device and your
pc using a large variety of free software which Google provides.

This is all available for free for the basc email which is the most that people need. Gmail also allows you
to use free pop3/smtp and imap. All for no charge.

2. Google Docs

Google now has a word processor and a spreadsheet available for free all online. If you are on a netbook
this is a great way to access basic features. Google docs now accesses Office 2007 files with full
compatibility.

3. Picasa Online

Picasa is Google’s online photo storage on the cloud. I use it for storing all my photo’s on the Internet. In my opinion it is the best Photo storage application on the web. Picasa interfaces with desktop client’s as well as mobile phone client’s.

4. Google Voice

A number of years ago Google bought a voice application called Grand Central. The nice thing with Google Voice is it stores your voice mail messages in the cloud. It allows people to contact you using one phone number and it is fully portable. Unfortunately all the features are not available yet in Canada.

5. Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blog platform. I used it before I moved to a wordpress site. It is easy to use and very popular.

6. You Tube

You Tube is Google’s cloud based video sharing/storage application. I personally find YouTube easy to use and easy to search. Google is very popular especially with the younger crowd. My son watches more You Tube then tv these days. He is 17 and at that age. I can even watch You Tube on my IPhone.

7. Google Wave

It is interesting to see how this pans out. Google Wave will be Google’s biggest social media application. Where Google Wave pans out is to be seen since it is still in Beta.

These are just the tip of the iceberg. Google is king in the cloud application game. In the next year Google will eventually expand it’s cloud application base to even possibly include Twitter.

A really good source of information for finding about Google in the cloud is the Google’s Blog

Today’s big announcement was that Friendfeed was purchased by Facebook. Friendfeed is a great feed aggregation service. Friendfeed allows it’s users to import other feeds from various social media sites into it. This can include everything from YouTube, Facebook,Twitter and even your own blog. It should be noted that this is one of the things I like about the service.

So far I have not read any financial terms on other web sites on what the deal cost Facebook or what the terms of the deal were.

This deal was bound to happen and many more of them will happen before it is out. Companies in the business world constantly go through mergers as they try and increase their market share or increase the types of products they carry. Tech companies are not exempt from acquisitions. In my opinion their are way too many players in the social media game and as a result some mergers/buy outs need to happen to streamline the industry.

Why did Facebook choose Friendfeed. Their are several reasons this happened the biggest I believe is Friendfeed’s technology. Friendfeed has aggregation technology built into it. This is the most powerful part of it’s entire offering and one of the one’s I like most.

The second reason I believe this acquisition happened is because of similarities between the two services. Facebook recently has added features like adding a “like” option to posts and changing the way comments to posts are displayed. If you did not realize you were on FaceBook you would think that you were using Friendfeed.

The third big reason I believe for the sale of Friendfeed is Friendfeed has not made the mainstream. It is mostly a hang out for the geek crowd. This is actually the part I will miss most because it has kept away all the advertisers. It will no longer be a safe refuge from all of the constant badgering to buy stuff.

The forth reason I believe this happened is to get a jump of Google. Google is eventually going to have Wave go live and this will be a major social media offering. Google already has Blogger, YouTube and it’s own Google Profiles. I do believe it is a matter of time before Google scoops up Twitter so Facebook had to move now to stay competitive.

Today’s buyout is the first of many in the social media arena that I believe will happen within the next year. I do believe Facebook had to make this purchase to get a jump on it’s competition. Only time will tell if the purchase pays off in the long run.

A copy of new Google products have come out in the last while that I have been meaning to comment on. The first is Google’s entry into the browser market with Chrome. I believe Google will be hard pressed this time. Internet Explorer/Safari(if you have a Mac) and Firefox already have most of the market. Why do we need another browser?

I played with Chrome a little bit lately and I am really not that impressed.  Chrome seems to have a real issue with Flash web sites and this is a big issue for me since I am browsing the web all the time. One thing chrome is optimized for is other Google services such as Gmail. Chrome seems to run faster with Gmail.

The second Google update I have been playing with is one that I really like – Picasa 3 Beta. Picasa 3 Beta is a slick as version 2 and it runs even faster. The folks at Google have added more editing features and more light adjustment features for version 3. Transfering files to your Picasa Web Album is much faster on the same Internet connection then with version 2. A must download for anyone trying to manage their photo collection.

Chrome download:

Chrome Download

Picasa Beta 3 Download:

Picasa Beta 3 Download

Well yesterday it seems Gmail had a bit of an outage.According to the Gmail blog their were issues for several hours. According to the Gmail blog, the issue are now resolved.

Gmail Blog Story on Gmail Issues.