Updated: Today we’ve received an email and seen multiple tweets alerting us to the fact that Google’s App Engine software development platform is down. We’ve emailed the company for details, but in the meantime, a check of the App Engine status page won’t even load at 11:30 a.m. PDT, and updates on the site indicate that it’s been put into unplanned maintainance mode after experiencing problems this morning.

Update: A Google spokeswoman tells us that the service was down because of a storage issue. She emailed a statement that read: “Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem and service has now been restored. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site.”

We’ve seen several complaints about the impersonal way Google seems to be handling this, criticism that certainly may cause the company harm in its quest to woo the enterprise to its platform. Readers, can Google keep App Engine flying?

Several marketing associations supported by Google have banded together and released seven principles that they believe should govern online privacy. Are you ready for a journey to the Emerald City? Because the principles are the online advertisers’ attempts to stave off government regulation around protecting consumers’ online privacy by diverting attention to the Great and Powerful Principles rather than the data scavenging that’s going on behind the curtain. Kind of like a certain self-aggrandizing wizard.

Given that Congress has been keen to see opt-in programs, and there’s no mention of that in these principles, my hope is that regulators won’t be taken in by this, and will still fight for better disclosure of advertising practices and an opt-in program. In the meantime, let’s pull back the curtain and check out what the wizards of marketing are telling us. Below are the marketing principles taken directly from the position paper — and in italics, what they really mean: Continue »

Facebook is testing a set of changes to its privacy settings that will make it easier for folks to control what they share and with whom. Essentially the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network is betting that if its users have more control over privacy, they’ll share more. To be sure, the current privacy settings are made up of many unnecessary layers. As part of the test, Facebook will be asking a small group of users to “revisit and reaffirm” their privacy setting using a so-called “transition tool.” As Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, explains in a blog post:

The test we’re launching today will include a small fraction of the total number of people on Facebook. This group will receive the new, simpler settings and one of six different versions of the Transition Tool. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be collecting direct feedback from the testing group and using it to make improvements to the tool. Our goal is to ensure that people understand the changes to our privacy settings and make choices that reflect their comfort level. After the testing and feedback phase is complete, we expect to offer final versions of the tool and the new settings to everyone on Facebook.

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If you use self-described “web site traffic and promotion company” uSocial.net to buy votes on Digg and StumbleUpon, you’ll be thrilled to know it’s expanded its service to Twitter. For just $87, uSocial will generate an additional 1,000 Twitter followers to the account of your choosing. Sweet! Ratchet up your order to more than 5,000 new Twitter followers and you’ll even get a discount. Continue »

When Heyzap, the San Francisco-based startup that offers up casual, Flash-based games for publishers to embed to their sites, launched back in January, revenue was being generated by the short ads shown before its games. But as the economic downturn tightened its grip and the online advertising market continued to flounder, Heyzap founders Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila saw the need for a different revenue model. So last week they rolled out Heyzap Payments. Continue »

Cisco today outlined its plans for delivering IT services over the web (aka cloud services), and as part of a conference call, showed off a great slide that illustrates exactly how many companies this former networking gear maker wants to take on. If I were to boil it all down, I’d say the company’s cloud strategy relies heavily on its hardware to make its WebEx-branded collaboration software run economically. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO, said the company sees the cloud as having four layers, with the bottommost layer being the hardware infrastructure provided by Cisco’s new servers. The top three are the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, platforms as a service and software as a service (see slide). Continue »