Chief Google Watcher

What do you think the cost will be to businesses and individuals relying on Google's Gmail service after today's sudden, unplanned, unexpected outage?

Have we put too much confidence in the reliability of the Gmail service?

What suggestions do you have for a "backup plan" for future #GmailFail situations?

Please post your thoughts in the comments!

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, today writes this inspiring message:

Technology companies from Cisco to Nokia to Siemens that have provided technology to enable censorship and tracking, and companies from Yahoo to Google that have handed over information about users to governments that use it to oppress citizens should be ashamed. And we need to shame them. We need to give

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OK the headline is more incendiary than the actual story, but half of it is straight from the Gizmodo post that broke the story.

The only real news here is that Google employees who in the past have enjoyed year-end cash bonuses of up to $20,000 are instead this year getting an $180 Googlephone, which the company describes as "eating their own dogfood." Is it evil? I say, n… Continue

The Register reports: "Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement -- and nobody has yet grasped its significance ...

"Make no mistake, Google is moving into new territory: not only making arbitrary, editorial choices -- really no different to Fox News, say, or any other media organization. It's now in the business of vali… Continue

According to Precursor LLC, they have just conducted the first-ever research study of U.S. consumer Internet bandwidth usage and costs with the objective of estimating how much bandwidth Google uses and pays for. The result?

"The data confirm the study’s core hypotheses, that: Google is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth, Google’s share of ba

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