Google's fourth quarter earnings missed Wall Street estimates, sending the stock crashing after hours.
According to Thomson Financial, Google's fourth quarter revenue came in at $4.83 billion, which was up 51% from a year ago. After advertising sales costs revenue came in at $3.39 billion, below the $3.45 billion analysts had expected.
"We're very pleased with our performance this quarter," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "It reflects strong momentum in our core business, growing receptivity to our new business initiatives, and improved discipline in managing our operating expenses."
Google's closest rival Yahoo! also disappointed Wall Street when fourth quarter net income fell 23% from a year ago. Microsoft a laggard in the space is gaining some traction with users and this might give a lift to their search advertising unit adCenter. Which in turn would increase the pressure on keyword pricing which will ultimately affect the earnings outlook for Google and Yahoo!
The WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo was a great success! The Conference was on Wednesday and had about 1,000 registered attendees. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to making it a success - thank you to the Keynotes Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist and Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, all the very knowledgeable and insightful speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees. The feedback we've received has been fantastic. Photos and videos will be posted shortly.
The day started off with introductory remarks from Daya Baran, President of WebGuild, who noted that Web 2.0 is representative of many things including free or almost free, open, accessible, community, social, collaboration, sharing, and innovation and that these are the elements we've strived to stay true to in bringing you this Conference and that the Conference is about knowledge sharing and community.
Opening Keynote, Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia was fantastic. He talked about Wikia's wiki communities including the most famous of them all, Wikipedia, and about the newly launched Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine. Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist was a knockout and his session was very informative and entertaining. He was very candid about Craigslist's rise, the site's very un-Web 2.0 design, his view on advertising, eBay's stake, and his role as Customer Service Rep.
Many of the breakout sessions such as Designing For Users, Usability 2.0, Designing the Mobile Web, Web Marketing, Web Dev, and others were standing room only. The User Revolution session where we turned the tables and interviewed actual users and members of the Web 2.0 generation in person was very insightful and interesting.
Winners of the Web 2.0 Website Awards were as follows: Craigslist for Best Online Community Website, Best Web 2.0 Apps went to Zoho, Best Emerging Social Networking Site went to Socializr, and BarackObama.com for Best Politicking Website (Barack was not available to accept in person but a rep from his campaign did).
Verisign's former CTO Aristotle Balogh is Yahoo!'s new CTO. He replaces former CTO, Farzad Nazem, whoresigned in June. Balogh who will report to Jerry Yang and will lead Yahoo's global engineering organization and manage all the company's technology operations.
Yahoo also announced a new multi-year advertising agreement with AT&T and a 1,000 job cuts.
MySpace is finally getting ready to pull the trigger on its long-awaited platform for developers. Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th. The APIs will allow developers to create social applications for MySpace much like they can already for Facebook. The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platform, meaning that applications written for OpenSocial will work on MySpace with a few minimal tweaks.
More details will come out later about what exactly the APIs will allow developers to do, but at a high level they will allow for deeper integration into MySpace than can currently be done with Flash widgets. The APIs we believe will support Flash, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets, and give developers deeper access to MySpace member profile information and their connections. Developers also will be able to make money from advertising associated with their applications.
What it means: with all the talks about Facebook in the last 6 months, we tend to forget MySpace is still a major force in the social networking world. According to this recent eMarketer article, "The site received 72% of US visits to social networks in December 2007 alone" with Facebook a distant second at 16.03%. In terms of reach, MySpace had close to 72M unique visitors in October 2007 (source: eMarketer quoting ComScore) giving the site 40% reach of the US online market (Facebook is at 18%). In November, Compete data showed that only 20% of MySpace members were also on Facebook. So, if you're interested in reaching these 72M users, get in line to get a developer access.
The W3C has announced the publication of SPARQL , a language for querying distributed data on the web. Similar to the way SQL is a generic language used to query relational databases regardless of vendor, SPARQL will allow users and applications to create queries that express high-level goals across many different data sources, regardless of the database technology or data format involved.
From the W3C press release:
"Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL," explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "SPARQL makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the Web."...
The combination of the SPARQL query language and protocol creates a Web service in its purest sense; running on top of HTTP or SOAP, it provides a standard Web service for anything which asks a question.
"SPARQL's focus on querying the data models saves time for developers; there's no need for a host of little Web services to retrieve different aspects of the state of a system," explained Lee Feigenbaum, Chair of the RDF Data Access Working Group. "This allows the user of the SPARQL endpoint to ask any question -- it is as though they could design their own interface instead of having to work with a limited set of fixed services."
The press release goes on to say that the SPARQL specification defines both a query language and a protocol, and works well with other Semantic Web technologies from the W3C: RDF, RDF Schema, OWL and GRDDL.
Already available in 14 known implementations, SPARQL is designed to be used at the scale of the Web to allow queries over distributed data sources independent of format. It also can be used for mashing up Web 2.0 data.
This is a very positive development for the Semantic Web field in general; the promise of the Semantic Web depends on a set of core standards, of which SPARQL is an important one.
At its core, the operation of the Semantic Web is composed of the following basic functions:
Creating content with meaning (either implicit, like XML, or explicit, like Tags)
Understanding or extracting the information from a block of content
Classifying the blocks of content (into a hierarchy, taxonomy or folksonomy)
Presenting the information in a variety of forms (web, mobile, web services API, mashups, embedded devices and so on)
Finding the information of interest; this information may have to be derived from the content provided
The rise of easy-to-use self-publishing tools has led to an explosion in the amount of content available on the Web, and being able to find the answer to a question from this mountain of information is vital.
But first users have to be able to express what they are looking for, in a meaningful way. It is this need that is being addressed by SPARQL, which allows users to formulate intelligent queries. These queries can then be used by agents and applications on our behalf to find us the information we need.
There are only 4 days remaining until the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.
Visit the Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS, Inc.) booth, proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo, to check out their Web 2.0 specific promotions and to enter for a chance to win an iPhone! The winner will be announced at the event.
Today came a post in Kevin Rose's blog notifying users of Digg's change in its algorithm. The main change is that it will now take into account voting patterns and will promote stories to the main page (a really valuable web real estate) depending on "diversity of voters who have voted for the story". What this essentially means is that, firstly, stories will take longer time or more Diggs to make it to the front page. For instance, a few days ago stories with a Digg count of 60-70 often made it to the front page while there were instances of stories with 145 Diggs still present in the upcoming section. Secondly, and more importantly, it is an effort on the part of Digg to lessen the influence of top diggers in its community who presently contribute at least 10% of articles that make it to main page of Digg. Each of the top users have a fan following on Digg and their stories automatically get 70-80 diggs and they receive a boost over new joinees in terms of stories they want to submit. This change aims to make Digg a level playing field for old powerful users and new users.
This step of course hasn't gone well with top users with many crying foul over how this algorithm change suggests that top digg users are gaming digg. In the words of Derek, a power user on digg:
"I was quite surprised by Kevin's announcement. Personally I thought all the controversy was a bunch of hot air. It all started because a user by the name of digitalgopher stayed home sick from work a couple days ago and spent the day submitting even more awesome content to Digg then usual. Naturally, this resulted in a lot more of his stories being promoted to the front page than usual that day. This caused a couple of users to panic and before you know it we have people calling for the heads of the top 100 users."
And obviously top users are upset, since this algorithm directly hits on their well earned reputation and fan following. Also, it is taking longer for stories to make it to main page which make them cry about good missed content. Visit this site and you will notice concerns that many people have with digg and which has been inflated with algorithm changes. The situation went so bad that Kevin and Jay, its founders had to talk to top digg users in an attempt to quell their fears. Note that its users have already been upset with digg about issues like banning of accounts without any reason and digg not replying to mails that are sent to them.
However, I think that in one respect that what Digg really needs to change is in terms of transparency. Users want to know if there is a feature called "Auto-Bury List" in digg which automatically buries stories that belong to particular URLs. Kevin and Jay have mainly avoided this question till now. Also in question are digg editors who scan stories and bury which seems inappropriate to them. These features are not necesserily negative, but the problem is the lack of transparency and digg users being kept out of loop. Digg should remember that many users submit stories to digg because they feel themselves to be part of the digg community as contributors. If they are kept out of the loop and their account banned due to TOS violation without giving any reason/warning to them, these users will tend to go look for other options. I had noted in an article about top social media sites that many digg users have left to join mixx, another social voting site with richer facilities than digg. What digg must remember that its value lies only in its community of contributors and thus be nicer and open with them. Many of the users there contribute because they love digg and digg should also love them back so that good stories keep coming in.
We all know Craigslist which is described as a centralized network of online communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, internships, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories) and forums on various topics. Craig, himself, is a web-oriented software engineer by training, with 30 years of IT experience at companies such as IBM and Bank of America, Craig now spends his days working as a customer service rep at Craigslist.
In 1995 while Craig was working at Schwab, he started craigslist as an email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, Craig retired from IT consulting to work full-time on Craigslist. What started as a fun side project in Craig's living room has since grown into one of the busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust. Craig continues to embrace his inner nerd though he no longer wears thick black glasses that are held together with tape, and he retired the plastic pocket protector some years ago.
Craig is involved with a variety of community efforts and is particularly interested in organizations promoting public diplomacy, mideast peace and new forms of media such as participatory journalism. He's on the boards of Sunlight Foundation, OneVoice, FactCheckED, and VotoLatino. Craig graduated from Case Western University.
Don't miss his keynote! Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia will be the first Keynote.
Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.com will be the first headline Keynote Speaker at the upcoming WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. Wikia is a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. They currently support over 4,700 communities in more than 70 languages. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software. Explore their existing communities or start a new one. The company also just released Wikia Search, a community driven search engine.
Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wikia.com, the largest commercial wiki information and news site, that generates hundreds of millions of page views per month via 800,000 pages of content created in 70 languages in the last three years. Hot topics include the largest World of Warcraft game information resource, travel and city guides and deep-diving fan sites on entertainment topics. Prior to Wikia.com, Gil was an executive at eBay for 8 years, most recently as a regional VP for eBay in Europe. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.
Don't miss his keynote! Craig Newmark, Craigslist Founder, will be the other Keynote.
Today's New York Times has an article on hotel and restaurant reviews. They mostly talk about TripAdvisor and IgoUgo (which I had never heard of until today) and compare them to Zagat. Most of the information in there has been thoroughly discussed before (user reviews vs. editor reviews, moderated vs. un-moderated comments) but one quote from Tim Zagat (Zagat's co-founder) really stood out for me. Talking about consumer reviews, he said:
"Some Internet companies are running into the problem that anybody can throw up things on the wall, and after a while there are just too many people doing it."
What it means: Tim Zagat is onto something. He doesn't express it that way but it's all about reviews from "trusted sources". A trusted source could be, for example, a pro reviewer/critic (aggregated in sites like Metacritic.com), a friend or someone from an affinity group (or trusted community). Some of the travel and review sites out there suffer from a lack of "trusted sources" and it's the reason why we often feel like there's too much information to process when we see hundreds of reviews for a hotel or restaurant. Why would I trust travelingmom526 or baroudeur2004? If they're not direct contacts, how do I know if they have the same taste as me?
I recently met Tariq Krim, Netvibes Founder and CEO. The company has just come out with the next gen of their personalized homepage Netvibes Ginger. This is a private beta release of the service; general availability for all users is expected in mid-Feb.
As described on the site, with the beta, users can "create and personalize a netvibes Universe page just for yourself or publish one for your friends, family, everyone! A Universe is your very own personal dashboard that's updated live directly from all your favorite Web services (email, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, widgets) and media content (blogs, podcasts, video). Everything you enjoy on the Web, available at a glance, all in one place — spend less time surfing and logging in from site to site and more time enjoying your web, your way."
Ask.com is leveraging the core capability of what the mobile phone does best i.e. transit speech, to provide voice-activated directions. Ask.com Mobile announced that they've added a new option to their Directions service called Click to Speak. The feature lets Ask.com Mobile users verbally enter addresses by speaking instead of keying them in. Users can activate a voice activated directions service with a click and within seconds receive a text message with a link to directions.
Here's a how-to video but basically, from your mobile device, you navigate to www.ask.com or http://m.ask.com, click on "Directions", then click "Click to Speak the addresses - no typing" link, click the "Continue" link to start the service and follow the voice prompts to speak your start and desired end location. You will then receive a text message with a link to the directions.
eBay's CEO, Meg Whitman, is reportedly planning to retire. Meg has been at the head of the company for 10 years and is responsible for building and growing the company from the early days of the dot com boom through the rocky road of its highs and lows. She is widely considered a pioneer and icon of the consumer internet business and has helped to shape and define the industry as we've come to know it.
Meg joined eBay as president and CEO in March 1998 when the company was still a small auction website with 30 employees. eBay is, today, a global ecommerce force. The company has been experiencing some difficulty with some acquisitions, maintaining its revenues, and falling stock price. Before eBay, Meg was with toymaker Hasbro and was president and CEO of FTD. John Donahoe, eBay's auction business unit head, is expected to succeed her.
If you are interested in OpenID, OAuth, OpenAuth and related technologies, come hear the high-powered panel on this subject at the WebGuild's Web 2.0 Conference and Expo at the Santa Clara Marriott on January 29, 2008.
Shreyas Doshi, Sr. Product Manager, Identity Products, Yahoo! Inc.
The panel will begin at 1:45 PM and will be exploring whether these technologies are ready for prime time and what's coming, why Google, Yahoo!, AOL and VeriSign have implemented what they have already, and what's in it for you as a web developer or web business.
If you have questions you'd like to ask the panel post them here.
Marketers are still trying to apply old rules to the new game. Thinking online video ads can be approached like TV ads is a mistake. In fact, a recent study noted that half of all respondents stopped watching online videos once they encountered in-stream advertisements (I know I would have done the same). Expecting viewers to sit through a 15-30 second commercial before getting to the actual content is not realistic in the online world. Heck, people don't even like watching commercials on TV and thanks to DVRs 53% of people don’t have to.
As with everything 2.0 there are some marketers that do this better than others -- those who are experimenting with using just a corner of the screen or placing the ads in separate screens all together are headed in the right direction. I think that there is a place for online video advertisements but we need stop thinking it's just a new kind of TV and come to the boardroom with a fresh new approach. The focus needs to be about making the ads relevant and non-disruptive.
Google now allows you to associate other email addresses with your Google account. If you sign into your Google account and click on "Edit" next to "Personal Information" you will see the below.
You can only add one email address at a time but what this allows you to do is to associate other information from your other email addresses with your main Google account so information is synchronized. This is useful for things such as appointments which can show up centrally in your Google Calendar if they are sent to any of your other email addresses.
Interestingly, I tried to add another Gmail address and got this message "You can not associate a Gmail address with your Google Account." I tried to add two other non-Gmail email addresses of mine but got "A user with the email you specified already exists" which apparently means 'it's possible that you've already created another Google Account with that username. Someone may have also accidentally entered your email address when creating a Google Account, but hasn't been able to verify email ownership'. Finally, I got a third to work. An email verification is sent to the email address you requested to be added and you can activate it from there.
Information Week recently did a story on five outsourcing predictions for 2008 and in it they prognosticate that companies using offshore outsourcing will make more time and effort to ensure the success of such projects; more offshore work will go to Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, and other low-cost locations as India struggles to deal with its tightening IT talent pool; India IT salaries will continue their annual double-digit increases, rising perhaps even higher than the 15% range suggested by Indian service providers, but not so much that U.S. companies won't continue to be attracted by the cost savings/skill level combo offered by Indian technologists; India will decline as a location for telephone call center jobs for U.S.-based companies; and the U.S. unemployment rate for IT is still very healthy right now, about 2%, and most Web-based development skills are in high demand. But if a recession hits, layoffs may follow.
Eventually, the offshore wage costs will increase based on basic supply and demand forces, minimizing the effectiveness of this practice. Already, according to a Business Facilities article on Trends in Offshoring Kinsey Global Institute and Nasscom, India’s software industry association, showed that entry-level wages rose 13% per year between 2000 and 2004, and mid-level managers’ salaries climbed 30% annually during that time. Wages in India and the Philippines continue to rise by 11% and 8%, respectively, XMG reports. "Last year, Apple Inc. withdrew its plans to build a captive center in India that was expected to employ 3,000 workers. While Apple did not publicly discuss its reasons for the decision, Business Week reported it was likely cost-driven, with wages for software engineers and IT managers soaring. Other factors may have included India’s high rate of turnover, and competition for quality employees."
There is also a trend towards what some consider reverse offshoring where offshore vendors set up operations in the U.S. to better serve U.S. companies. This only serves to strengthen the offshore vendors’ strengths and ability to service the company. The majority of silicon valley tech companies offshore and in a study conducted by the Zinnov research group of the top 50 Silicon Valley companies, comprised of 15 software developers, 27 hardware developers, and eight conventional or non-information-technology companies, they found that 33 had operations in India.
In Part IV of this series, I will outline some of the specific services being offshored. Related Posts: Part I | Part II
CNET and others are reporting that Yahoo will be laying off over 20% of it workforce. This represents 1,500 to 2,500 jobs of its 12,500 workforce. The cuts are speculated to be mostly of the company's European operations. Many consider this a step in the right direction to re-focus the company. This is, of course, also happening across many other tech companies in the Valley.
Here are a list of the top 5 social media sites as I see it and why.
Digg: We all know Digg, one of the most popular social news sites. It is also the first of its kind and has many loyal users who are working on the backend of Digg to bring in news to the homepage of Digg, where most people arrive. One can expect to find funny and interesting videos and images with stories from popular blogs on Digg. Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg, was looking for $300 million buyout of Digg, but as I had noted, it seems to be pretty difficult.
Reddit: While Digg started by centering on tech news and then expanding its domain, on Reddit it's mainly the political news that rule the roost. With a much simpler interface - in fact, too simple, I think it survives because it serves a niche.
Newsvine: This site has a bit more of a traditional look with its content being not wholly user contributed but also automatically picked from sources like Associated Press, ESPN, New Scientist, etc. Of course, users can submit their stories too, but self promotion there is heavily frowned upon!!! Its interface and look and feel though is much admired.
Mixx: Now, this site is said to have a future. Though presently, a small but active community, it has mainly received good reviews. Recently, it introduced features for private or public groups inside its community which basically did away with the need for Digg clones. Another reason behind the rise of Mixx was that it got be an alternate site for Digg refugees, people who were banned from Digg or frustrated because of the untransparent way in which Digg functions. What I am referring to, is buries of certain stories and account bans that happen on Digg without giving a clear reason and being unresponsive to their claims. Many of these users have moved over to Mixx as can be seen by Digg related stories which often make it to their homepage :).
Propeller: This site was touted to be the one among many Digg clones that were present but has not really lived up to its initial publicity. Even though it has grown slowly, I am waiting to see what is unique thing they will try to do or to find a niche that would bolster their growth.
Email tops the list of the most requested service for mobile users. In a poll conducted by Webcredible, a UK usability firm, of about 1K mobile phone users they asked people 'Which service would you use on your mobile/cell phone if speed & quality weren't an issue?'. 33% said email would be their number one choice followed by 25% for social networking. This was followed by local info about their surroundings at 20%; travel, mapping, and directions at 13%; and not surprising, much lower on the list is online shopping coming in at 9%. Users are generally more interested in quick information seeking on the go versus shopping on their mobile device. Also, the smaller form factor inhibits usability for longer time period use, cumbersome keypad, ability to view images clearly, long and costly download times, and encryption security.
I didn't see any mention of texting. It is interesting, though, that social networking appears to be high on the wish list. According the Webcredible "One of the driving factors in enabling this will be the usability of the site and the skill with which site developers transfer from PC format to mobile format. Facebook has already developed a very accessible and usable mobile version of their site, ensuring its members get their daily Facebook fix".
Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a competition to do just that. The idea is to develop a lot of original cool apps that are highly functional as well as usable. The apps need to access core Android functionality like location-based services, accelerometer and always-on networking.
The smartphone market is heating up and Google is looking to the development community to create the killer app that's going to make people switch to Android. Apple also recently announced that it will be releasing an iPhone/iPod Touch SDK in late Feb.
Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Apps on the iPhone. Just a month after the launch of its initial version, the Google Apps for iPhone diehards have gotten even slicker. The web applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader are now sporting an even more streamlined interface intended to make the applications faster, easier to activate, and improve their overall usability via the iPhone touch-screen interface.
The new features include the ability to customize default tabs for easier navigation, speedier Gmail where new emails automatically appear eliminating the need to do a manual refresh, at-a-glance monthly view of Calendar appointments, and access to and synchronization of iGoogle gadgets on the iPhone. The redesign is intended to provide iPhone users with a desktop-like web application experience optimized for the iPhone.
Google plans to expand this experience to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. To get the new Google experience on the iPhone, navigate to www.google.com on the iPhone Safari browser.
The WebGuild's kickoff event for the new year on The Future of Web Apps was a huge success. Thank you to everyone who attended and to everyone who contributed to making it a success. Many thanks to the speakers: Brad Neuberg, Google Gears; Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho; Bill Scott, Director of UI Engineering, Netflix; and John Rowell, Chief Technology Officer, OpSource. The video will be available shortly.
Today was a big day for OpenID, a single identity framework, given its anouncement that Yahoo is joining OpenID. OpenID is an admirable effort which aims to provide a centralized Identity system for authentication which can be used by any web site. You can read about the details if you are new to OpenID. Now that Yahoo has decided to join it, it means that the almost 250 million user accounts which are present in the Yahoo database are now part of OpenID, which consequently, means that the almost 9,000 sites that have implemented OpenID can now be simply accessed with one's Yahoo account. Of course, it's a big ease for Yahoo users since they won't have to create a new account for a new service they want to access. Note, that there have been rumors that Google is also thinking of becoming a part of it. Can there be any better news for OpenID?
Recently, there was also news that Facebook is joining DataPortability, which allows for the personal information of users to be portable to another service which also implements the same open standard. While Facebook has made us realize the importance of the social graph, it was still a closed garden which didn't allow any data to go out allowing only varied applications which could be run only inside Facebook. In the words of dataportability: "(Aim is) actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems."
So, in a perfect and best case scenario, a user would need only one identity and his social information around it would be portable anywhere on the web and can be used by any service or widget or application. And this possiblity is much closer now with these two events that happened in 2008. Now, both OpenID and DataPortability are open standards and therefore, users would be much more willing and less fidgety about privacy issues. But of course, I highly suspect that everything would work perfectly from the point of view of the user. Note that services like Mybloglog arose because of a need for distributed identity which could be carried anywhere. Now with OPen identity and open social graph with info, much richer services than these can be launched. Of course details and services are a matter of pure speculation and I am also sure that many people are thinking about it. But what do you think? Comment up!!
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Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a 
Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Apps on the iPhone. Just a month after the launch of its initial version, the Google Apps for iPhone diehards have gotten even slicker. The web applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader are now sporting an even more streamlined interface intended to make the applications faster, easier to activate, and improve their overall usability via the iPhone touch-screen interface.
Recently, there was also