Back in September, Google Chrome was launched with quite a lot of fanfare, it was a big tech story and received a lot of attention. At the time there was speculation that it could not only threaten Internet Explorer, but even speculation that it could threaten Microsoft Windows itself. Today, with much less attention it was announced that Google Chrome was no longer a beta (test) product and the “goals for stability and performance have been met” but the developers also add “our work is far from done”. The announcement was reported by Reuters in their MediaFile blog pages though, where they posed the question “will you switch from your current browser to Chrome?”. Oddly enough I've been running a poll on this site which asked you the question “Are you planning to use Google Chrome as your default browser?”. The results are in, the poll is closed and the answer is pretty conclusive.

For about the last year I have abandoned the use of my workplace calendar system (based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange) and using paper diaries in favour of Google Calendar. This solution offers a number of advantages for me, it is entirely web based, it is platform independent and I can even see my appointments on my mobile phone thanks to the mobile version. I've also been using Mozilla Thunderbird, an excellent open source email program, for years. So it was very interesting to read Rob Parsons' post on getting these two technologies working together through a couple of add ons. It looks like Mozilla Thunderbird could become the Personal Information Manager of choice for those who use Web 2.0 services to manage their affairs thanks to an increasing number of addons. On the horizon is also an add on to integrate it with the popular web based task management system Remember the Milk, and apparently it is already possible to integrate Thunderbird with Google Mail.

The idea of PlanetOU was always to represent a community around an institution by aggregating blogs written by people connected to it (the idea is explained in full in my earlier post What planet are you from? PlanetOU of course!). It uses the core Aggregator module in Drupal to pull in content from about fifty different websites to make a constant stream view of the latest blog posts from OU staff bloggers. This approach works well, but a key point to note here is that when feed items are imported in this way Drupal does not create new node items (it isn't native content to the software that runs this site), and as such are not visible to the built-in search engine. These blogs are spread across many different domains (e.g. only a few people on the TwitterLeague for OU people use the OU's blogging facilities) and so are not indexed by any institutional search engine. Fortunately there is now a solution to this challenge; a Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE).

No doubt the big tech story of the week has been the release of the new Google Chrome browser, Google's new entrant into the browser wars. Like many others I downloaded this and gave it a go to see what the fuss was about. So first gripe, the current beta is only for Windows, although we are being promised versions for Linux and the Mac. This is an interesting decision, maybe it was taken as they don't want to aim the product at "geeks"? However, as an old manager of mine used to say, let's "park that thought" for the moment and look at the browser itself. Google came up with a great way to explain their new browser and its features; they did this in the form of a comic book and this can been seen at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I'm not really into comics or graphical novels, but this made a refreshing change from a white paper or a powerpoint-type presentation, although I must admit my attention was starting to stray at the end! This is well worth reading as it explains the whole project and its features very well.

A while ago you might recall I blogged about the blurring of offline and online worlds, now another development is contributing to this change. Today I was delighted to find that my Google Docs account has been enabled with offline functionality. Basically this means that it is possible to start a document while online, continue to work on it while offline and then synchronise the change when you next go back online. Google have explained the feature in full, and included a video on it on their blog. This is a very useful feature as storing documents online makes it easy to share them with colleagues and also to switch between machines. It struck me that one very handy place for this feature would be on the Asus EEE PC especially as it has a link to Google Docs already from the easy mode menu.

Google this week anounced that it was going to let outside developers host their applications on Google infrastructure through a new product: Google App Engine. This is the latest in a long list of products from Google who are most probably the world's leading Internet company and may well become the most important IT company, if they aren't already. The offering from Google does not work in the same way as conventional web hosting, instead you must devise a solution that will work with their infrastructure, but in return the promise that your solution will be able to scale to keep up with demand with such things as load balancing taken care of automatically. This probably won't be a problem for most developers who are used to devising solutions that work with in-house IT requirements anyway.

Up to now the computing experience has been divided into two - online and offline. Being online means using sites through a web browser, offline means working with different applications, mostly designed to work with documents not stored on the Internet, but instead on local file systems. However, changes changes in the way we communicate and work are starting to make this arrangement look creaky and old fashioned so thoughts have turned to how to integrate these two worlds.

Many visits to websites now are as a result of a search made by a user. In fact you may be reading this very article as a result of using a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo. Traditionally, to make search engines of new content on your site that you might like to make visitors aware of, you had to wait for a visit from a Web Crawler, a program used by search engine companies that visits websites and analyses them to find out sort of information they contain. The problem with this is that you don't know how long you might have to wait for that Web Crawler to next pop round and share your new content with the world. Fortunately, this has now changed, and the big search engines have created a mechanism to update them with up to date content information about your site.