Wondering where your morning fix of Chris Gilmer is? We wanted to expose Chris's obsessive coverage of "everything Google" to a larger audience, and we asked him to join the Download Squad team. Are you familiar with Download Squad? It is our blog about the user experience in all kinds of software and online services. Chris accepted our offer, so as of today you will find his posts on Download Squad. You can roll your Download Squad experience in several different ways:

BOOKMARKS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com

The Google category:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/google/

All Chris all the time:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/chris-gilmer/

RSS FEEDS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/rss.xml

The Google category feed:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/google/rss.xml

The Unofficial Google Weblog will remain exactly where it is, with its tremendous archive of blog entries. Use it as a reference point, and point your browser/newsreader to Download Squad for the continuous Google updating you've come to expect. Thanks for reading!

Google Calendar is live, and it rocks. I'm not shy with my complaints of Google's erratic launch quality during the past two years, but credit is due here. This thing is gorgeous, easy, flawless during my initial poking, lubricated with Web 2.0 juice, and brain-dead simple to use.



I've used Yahoo! Calendar forever, preferring an online solution that I can access anywhere to Outlook or some other program that resides on the computer. While I remain loyal to Yahoo! in several departments, I believe that as of today I have used Yahoo! Calendar for the last time.

I just got the full roll-out of Gmail chat in my account, and took it for a test drive. As mentioned before, I love this idea. Automatic archiving of chat transcripts plugs a hole in Google Talk, and exposing those transcripts to Gmail-style searching is fantastic. It turns out that you can integrate chat search results with mail search results, or (using search options) launch a dedicated chat-transcript search.

The Gmail-chat experience starts with a Quick Contacts list that appears in the Gmail sidebar. This list is populated with recent email contacts, and lacks intelligence in ways that might be difficult to solve. I subscribe to many work-related and industry mailing lists, and those list addresses appear as Quick Contacts. Obviously, I'm never going to chat with a listserv. Fortunately, a quick Ajax pop-out lets me remove those impersonal contacts.

That same pop-out contains Mail and Chat buttons for starting either type of communication.

More after the jump...

A late announcement is better than no announcement. With apologies to Chris for my tardiness, let me introduce him to the readership of The Unofficial Google Weblog. Chris made a name for himself with his Google Crumbs blog, and he recently agreed to transfer his voracious appetite for Google news and commentary to us. I couldn't be more thrilled to have him on staff. Chris has already started tearing it up with a few entries preceding this post. I'm looking forward to more. Welcome and thanks, Chris!

One of the big holes in Google Talk is about to be filled--in a proprietary manner. Google is in the process of rolling out Gmail Chat, a feature that will save chat transdcripts within Gmail, and subject them to search. Saving and searching archived chats was impossible when Google Talk was rolled out. This integration of Google Talk with Gmail also helps explain why owning a Gmail account is a requirement of Google Talk.

Google has announced this feature, so it is not one of Gmail's stealth updates. Implementation is currently erratic; in my account I see a Chat category between Starred and Sent Mail, but there is no inline chatting as yet. Such is promised, though: chatting within Gmail, where (presumably) transcripts are automatically archived. This is fairly fabulous, especially for business users who must manually save many of their chats for future reference. And searching is always a problem because a chat might wander topically all over the map, and the saved file is difficult to name effectively.

Google's vision of integrated chat and mail is now clarified, and valuable. Other IM programs call out to the Inbox and notify when mail arrives. But enabling chat within the Webmail service, automatically saving the chats, and exposing them to state-of-the-art search, sets the bar at a new level. This is important stuff. I can hardly wait for it to be fully rolled out.

Is a person un-American if he doesn't watch the Super Bowl? I am not! It's just that nobody told me it was on. Anyway, the best part (the ads) are archived on Google Video. Blockbuster: boring. Burger King: weird. Bud Light: "Magic fridge. Magic fridge." Google Video: great job. [thanks to Dave Zatz]

It's all about inflation. And disappointed expectations. And hope. And fear. Oh-- and the Internet advertising market. Which some people would characterize as a bubble. Consider that Google's quarterly report divulged adjusted earnings per share of $1.54, disappointing analysts who were expecting about 25 cents more per share. Now consider that Google was trading in the mid-400s per share. As much as 50 bucks was knocked off its price during a cyclonic after-hours ride. GOOG stock prepares to open this morning down over 10 percent. That's Wall Street for you: a game of psychology and speculation more than accounting.

Over 16-billion dollars of shareholder equity has been wiped out in the past 24 hours. (I imagine some recently hired employees showing up to the 'Plex in a grim mood today.) The blow was so severe that index futures across the board were affected. Robert Holmes of TheStreet connected the dots between Google's crash and the rising dollar against the yen. Whatever.

Google's fourth-quarter results, by any measure except Wall Street's are spectacular. Riding the Net-ad boom (or, more accurately, galvanizing it), Google gained 86 percent over the year-ago fourth quarter. The company is expanding its product line at a dizzying pace. The stock hasn't exactly been brought down to earth, and GOOG's market cap makes seven-year-old Google one of the richest media companies in the world. Disappointed expectations don't bother me. I'm more worried about the publisher lawsuits and Google's China policy.

This small lawsuit brought by a single individual has large implications. Author and attorney Blake Field served Google with an infringement claim over the Google's cache feature, which makes, stores, and distributes copies of Internet pages, without permission. This issue has, for year, been ripe for testing. The implications for the Google Print Libraries project (currently under seige by two major lawsuits) is direct. If Google were ever prohibited from continuing its caching practice, it would certainly be prohibited from "caching" books--which is what Google Print amounts to.

Blake Field lost, in a summary judgment. According to the EFF, the court's decision contained four major points. Rather than risk making errors in describing these lawyerly distinctions, I'll quote from the EFF and add commentary. I am not a lawyer, but many years of following new-era copyright struggles have given me a fair layperson's understanding of the issues.

Serving a webpage from the Google Cache does not constitute direct infringement, because it results from automated, non-volitional activity by Google servers (Field did not allege infringement on the basis of the making of the initial copy by the Googlebot). I'm astonished to hear Google's cache described as "non-volitional," simply because Google's volition is carried out by automated software.

Field's conduct (failure to set a "no archive" metatag; posting "allow all" robot.txt header) indicated that he impliedly licensed search engines to archive his web page. This is the most amazing of all, and related directly to Google's attempt to copy books belonging to publishers who have not opted out of Google Print. The idea of implied licensing on this scale is new, I think, and indicates that we might be moving into a new definition of fair use. Traditionally, it is the user who must opt in to a licensing agreement with the owner; not the owner needing to opt out of the user's willy-nilly copying.

The Google Cache is a fair use. It is a judge's prerogative to rule fair use; that decision is always made case-by-case. But, predicated on the previous two points, I feel the question has remained relatively unexplored.

The Google Cache qualifies for the DMCA's 512(b) caching "safe harbor" for online service providers. This part of the ruling is entirely agreeable. (Check here for a description of this DMCA clause.) Wouldn't it have been sufficient without questionable fair use judgments?

Gotta love this one. Wayfaring.com has produced a Google Maps mashup that zooms in on key locations throughout the 4 -season run of TV thriller "24." It's called and Jacktracker (for series hero Jack Bauer) and even features screen caps from the show in the Google balloon pop-ups. [via TV Squad]

It's not much, but it's helpful and overdue. Google Video has reduced its clunkiness somewhat by displaying an array of 24 small thumbnails for its Video Store content. The 4-thumbnail Popular and Random sections remain.

Yahoo!'s CFO, Susan Decker, is quoted in Bloomberg News as making a surprising statement: "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google. It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." It's important to understand that Decker was not ceding to Google in terms of search quality, but only in terms of marketshare. In Europe and North America, Google's share has risen while Yahoo!'s has dropped in the last year. Most measurements do not include Aisian countries, according to another quoted source in the article, where Yahoo! is a popular choice for search.

Do investors not like it when a company refuses to comply with a government subpoena? Maybe that explains today's GOOG bloodbath. The stock traded in a range of 45 points, and it was mostly downward motion. touching 440 during the day, the slippery slide was halted late in the session by the psychological support line of 400. Is GOOG a bargain at 399? We'll find out Monday morning.

Google's resistant stance in the face of a government subpoena is admirable, though I suspect much of Google's attitude is about maintaining public trust. The government is not asking for personally identifying information, and that's probably why Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! complied so readily with its info-gathering mandate. At stake is an online pornography act that has been refuted once by the Supreme Court. The Bush administration is building its case based partly on analysis of amassed search-query data. Google collects this data; there is no hiding that fact which has made some critics nervous from the start. In light of the persistent edginess of privacy alarmists, I imagine Google does not want headlines blaring that the company capitulated by turning over information (anonymous or not) about user queries.

SEW is running an excellent roundup of the case and its documents.

If there were any doubt that Google is primarily an advertising company, not a search company, that doubt is eliminated today with the news of Google's purchase of dMarc. dMarc provides an automated advertising solution that puts ad spots on radio. dMarc enables advertisers to pick stations, target demographics, and upload digital content. The automated service allows for swift campaign changes and greater accountability than traditional ad brokering on radio. It'll be fasinating to see what Google does with this company and its technology.

Google has expanded the personalization of its home page beyond the browser and onto the cell phone; it's called Google Mobile Home. This page explains how to do it; you must customize the portable page separately from the browser page. This is a good thing, as it allows the user to select different content for the road, and for the time of day in which a cell phone might typically be used for the Internet. For example, stock prices could be important on the phone during the day, but unimportant on the browser page which is accessed at night.