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Google’s donation of $2 million to Wikipedia cements a long-standing symbiotic relationship between the search engine and the user-generated encyclopedia. But is that relationship a good thing or a bad thing? Some critics believe that Google gives Wikipedia preferential treatment in its search results. Read more »

AT&T will join the crowded Android bandwagon next month with the release of Motorola’s Backflip. That’s very good news for the handset manufacturer, which has struggled in recent weeks following its Droid launch thanks to the release of Google’s Nexus One. Read more »

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As ethereal as the terms “web services” and “cloud computing” sound, there’s nothing lightweight about the power and cooling required to make the Internet run. It takes data centers, plain and simple — each running 24/7 and housing thousands of servers and data storage systems – […] Read more »

What do collaboration toolmaker AppJet, social search manager Aardvark and email search appmaker reMail have in common? A trio of little startups, they all have been acquired recently by Google and they were all founded by former Google employees. Read more »

Google has acquired a small email search company called reMail, reMail founder Gabor Cselle posted today on his blog. reMail, which was part of the Y Combinator program and raised funding from FriendFeed and Gmail founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, started in November 2008. Read more »

Google continued to build on its impressive momentum in mobile this week as Android stole the headlines at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company’s increasing footprint in mobile has some network operators shaking in their boots — and for some very good reasons. Read more »

Despite apologies from Google, and changes to the innerworkings of its Buzz social networking service, a high-profile privacy group has taken its complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has urged the FTC to open an investigation into Buzz. Read more »

It’s time developers stop viewing mobile as an afterthought and start building mobile apps for less robust wireless connections and a variety of platforms. Programmers should stop trying to force design principals and habits learned on the PC-focused wired web into a mobile world. Read more »

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When Research In Motion bought Torch Mobile last year, we knew that a WebKit browser for BlackBerry had to be coming soon. It’s still “coming soon” — sometime this year — and RIM needs to hurry. Email and a good keyboard alone aren’t enough any longer. Read more »

Watching Google Buzz roll out was like watching a train wreck. It was terrible, but I couldn’t quite look away either. Anyone watching my Twitter stream when Google Buzz was first announced knows that I was really unhappy with the initial implementation: Read more »

Google says that it is “very, very sorry” for the way it launched Google Buzz and the features that some felt intruded on their privacy and revealed personal data. The company has made several substantial changes in response to complaints, and says more are coming soon. Read more »

Analysis from Compete shows that Facebook is driving more traffic to major portal sites than Google, and has become a top source for other web sites as well, another sign of how important the social web is becoming in terms of Internet traffic flows. Read more »

Microsoft wowed attendees at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today with an overhauled version of its venerable mobile operating system. But for Redmond to regain its mobile relevance and challenge players like Apple and Google, it will have to address three key challenges. Read more »

Google’s obsessive desire to organize information and our access to it is turning the company into a 21st century conglomerate. And whether you consider that a good thing or a bad thing for web users, it’s going to be a big problem for Google. Read more »

A few years ago, who would have thought that phones would one day be running chips with PC-quality oomph? Today one such platform was announced when STEricsson, a joint venture of Ericsson and ST Microelectronics, released the U8500. Read more »

When I interviewed Jared Neumark of Landline TV on Tuesday, one of the things we talked about was the difficulty of nailing fresh topical parody, because so many other comedy maestros online are trying to come up with jokes on the same topic as you. As […] Read more »

Just four days after launching Buzz, and two days after making some substantial changes to the service as a result of privacy concerns from users, Google has made another series of changes, including making the choice to follow someone opt-in rather than opt-out. Read more »

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Google and Apple have become giants in industry, and are beginning to encroach on each other’s home turf. They may have started out as small companies with a niche focus, but those days are long past. Watch as the two companies square off against each other. Read more »

Google has been struggling to make sense of the social web and integrate it into some of its products, but the reaction to Google Buzz is another indication of how the company continues to focus on features rather than real human experience. Read more »

Apple, since its 1970s launch, has enjoyed special favor and even worship from the open source community, free thinkers and supporters of open standards. And yet, with each new step, Apple becomes more closed. That’s why, as the cash registers ring in Cupertino, peril lies ahead. Read more »

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): With the iPad, Apple Takes Google to the Mat Infographic by Column Five Media Read more »

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Google pushed the hype machine into overdrive on two fronts this week. First it sprinkled some social networking features on Gmail and released Google Buzz. It quickly followed up with an announcement revealing plans to test a high-speed fiber-to-the-home network encompassing up to 500,000 households. The ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

Over the last few years Mobile World Congress, the mobile phone industry trade show, has experienced a shift from being about mobile phones to being about always-on connectivity. Mobile broadband has changed the value of the mobile ecosystem and thus the players who care about it. Read more »

If you still haven’t made up your mind yet about Buzz, here are some useful tips for customizing and automating the service so that it can work with your other social networks. We’ll also look at some ways to share messages and links via Buzz with specific groups. Read more »

Google Maps now has a series of “labs” features, allowing users to enable or disable enhancements such as aerial imagery (in certain locations only), as well as drag-and-zoom, smart zoom, location-based features, a satellite-imagery guessing game and other new options. Read more »

After a number of Google Buzz users complained that the service was exposing their email and GTalk contacts to the outside world without making it clear it would do that, the company has made changes to make privacy and other settings more obvious. Read more »

Google yesterday announced Google Fiber, an experimental network that would connect between homes to the Internet at speeds reaching 1 Gbps. Here is a list of places around the world where you can get 1 Gbps connections to your home. Read more »

Why do so many Apple products succeed when their competitors do not, even though they have more features? Because the company focuses its design thinking on several features that really matter, and ignores everything else, says Gmail creator and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. Read more »

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After months of pining — and even some whining — Google Chrome on Mac OS X now supports browser extensions and bookmark synchronization. Although there are thousands of extensions, these six are my must-haves. Which ones are you using or can you recommend? Read more »

Music bloggers are upset because they say Google deleted their blogs without warning as a result of DMCA claims about songs they posted. But some of the bloggers say they were given the tracks they posted by record labels themselves as a promotional effort. Read more »

At a fundamental level, Google Buzz is already much more functional than Wave, if only because it talks to other things easily and with a minimum of hassle. Plus it lives in your Gmail, which is where a lot of us spend much of our day anyway Read more »

Some Android customers are fuming after discovering that Google Buzz isn’t fully functional on their handsets. The news underscores the growing problem of the splintering of Google’s mobile OS — and it’s a problem that will only increase as Android expands its global footprint. Read more »

Google today announced an audacious plan to build what a cutting-edge broadband network. It is an experimental network, much like Google’s Wi-Fi network in the city of Mountain View, Calif. Google’s planned FTTH network won’t be cheap, but in the end it is worth the price. Read more »

Google Buzz is a bit like Twitter, a bit like Facebook, and a bit like Foursquare, but the one thing that makes it different from all of these services is that it is integrated with email. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? Read more »

There are a few widespread misconceptions about Cloudera, the promising, well-funded Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that offers services, training and support for the open-source software framework Hadoop. At least that’s what I found out during a talk earlier today with the company’s CEO, Mike Olson. Read more »

To figure out why Google has declared war on the existing communications network with its experimental fiber network, I chatted with Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager for alternative access at Google. Her group works on white spaces broadband, spectrum auctions and Google’s filings with the FCC. Read more »

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