After Google dropped its Chrome OS bomb yesterday, the news that Google is working on a new operating system generated a media frenzy. Our own MG Siegler covered the news from all angles, and did a live interview on Attack of The Show (embedded above).

As MG points out in the interview, this is just an entry point for Google (netbooks today, PCs tomorrow), and the announcement was expertly timed to take some of the attention away from Microsoft’s expected Office-in-the-cloud announcement next week.

The timing of Google’s announcement of Chrome OS was curious. I don’t mean the fact that Google moved up the post on it by a day when some details leaked out, I mean the fact that they were announcing it on some seemingly random date in July, well before anything is actually ready to show off. Now, we likely know why.

On Monday, Microsoft is set to unveil its plans to counter the attack Google previously had launched on it with Google Docs. Yes, Microsoft Office is going to the cloud. This is something which we all knew was eventually coming, and there is already some limited functionality, but the full details will pour out Monday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. You can expect the new version of Office, that syncs with the cloud, and the ability to use it in the cloud without any software as well.

With so much being said about Google’s new Chrome OS being a direct attack on Microsoft, naturally some of the gaze is now going to shift towards what it means for Apple, which makes the second most popular OS in the world. Here’s what it means — For its products, very, very little. For its board of directors, potentially a lot more.

While some have already talked about this a bit, I think main points have been missed. First, the obvious point: When Chrome OS launches next year it will be aimed directly at a market Apple is not in: Netbooks. Yes, Apple is likely to launch a tablet computer of some kind in the future, maybe next year, but that is not a netbook. That will be a touchscreen device that will undoubtedly run some kind of special flavor of the iPhone OS or OS X or a combination of the two. And I would bet that it will have stand-alone apps like the iPhone. That is not what Chrome OS is about.

It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.

Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer. From that article:

Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows…Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.

One representative response to my quote above, from The Register: “In no way can this statement be construed to make sense, and I’m not just being a pedantic asshole here. Fortunately, El Reg readers are with it enough to know that you need a proper OS before you can have a browser.”

Wow. So you know all those whispers about a Google desktop operating system that never seem to go away? You thought they might with the launch of Android, Google’s mobile OS. But they persisted. And for good reason, because it’s real.

In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,” Google writes tonight on its blog.

But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?

Last night we reported that Google had stripped all references and links to the free version of Google Apps from the landing page for the product. New users had just one option - to sign up for the Premier version and pay pay $50 per user per year after a 14 day free trial.

Google responded, saying “In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.”

Translation: they are trying to get more users to pay by making the Standard version harder to find. In that they succeeded brilliantly, but were obviously a little overzealous in hiding it.

Google just emailed to say that a link to the Standard version has been added back to the landing page. And they reiterate that they have no plans to kill the product, they’ll just make users play a version of Where’s Waldo to find it. (Ok, they didn’t really say that last part about Waldo).

The beta days are over at Google, at least for some of its most popular applications. As we predicted two months ago, Google is finally taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and GTalk today. And it is about time. For instance, Gmail, which launched five years ago and is by far Google’s most popular non-search app, is already older than many startups.

Gmail is now one of the leading email services and can no longer hide under the cover of a beta label. Over the past year in the U.S. alone, according to comScore, Gmail has grown 48 percent to 36 million unique visitors, quickly gaining on AOL Mail (40 million uniques, down down 6 percent) and Windows Live Hotmail (46 million uniques, down 1 percent) to grab the No. 2 spot after still-safe Yahoo Mail (98 million uniques, up 13 percent). Worldwide, Gmail had 146 million visitors in May, about half of Yahoo Mail’s and Hotmail’s numbers, and about three times bigger than AOL Mail.

Ever tried finding applications for the Android platform on the web rather than from your handset? Don’t even consider using the regular web version of Android Market - Google’s official app directory - on your computer’s browser: it has no search (irony much?), no categories, no community involvement like comments, ratings and reviews, and it’s only available in English for now.

In other words: it sucks.

As a reporter lacking an Android-powered phone but with a great interest in the platform, it sucks even more. Sometimes I need to know which applications in a certain category are available for Android, what people are saying about them, what versions a certain app is at, and so on. Until now, I used Cyrket for that, a third-party directory that provides me with most of the functionality I need for doing a bit of research about Android apps. But the website is slow, regularly returns errors and doesn’t provide a decent filter between paid and free apps, so the experience was usually below par.

You’d think on a phone that can do as many cool things as the iPhone, push email through one of the world’s most popular email services, Gmail, would be one of them. But for some reason, Google and Apple haven’t turned on the functionality for Gmail accounts on the iPhone. Sure, you can get push email through MobileMe, Yahoo Mail or Exchange, but basic Gmail users are basically out of luck. Until now, maybe.

Let me be clear, I’m still not certain that this app will even be approved for the App Store. But if it is, it’s pretty awesome.

It’s called GPush; it’s a very simple app that uses the new Push Notifications in the iPhone 3.0 software to ping your iPhone every time a new message comes in. Yes, not only is it push Gmail, it gives you Gmail with notifications. While you might think that could be annoying, it actually works quite well.

Since you see it every time you open your web browser, a good start page is key. Google has a pretty good option with iGoogle, which is highly customizable. But as social networking continues to rise in popularity, an increasing number of people just have something like Facebook as their main page. ZooLoo is kind of like iGoogle meets Facebook.

When you set up your ZooLoo account, you are given a dashboard which contains customizable widgets just like iGoogle. But you’ll see along both the top and bottom of the site elements that lead you to the more social aspects. Along the bottom, is your Facebook-style chat bar and options area. At the top of the main page you’ll find the tools to control your site and manage your media (pictures and videos).

And the key two words in there are “your site.” ZooLoo clearly wants to give you everything you want, so you never have to leave your ZooLoo. You want to watch YouTube videos? You can browse and watch them from in ZooLoo. Hulu videos? Same thing. Maybe you want to go read some news on popular tech blogs like this one? Again there’s a series of widgets you can install so you can do all of that without leaving.

The free version of Google Apps is history. The current sign up page makes no mention of the previously free Standard edition. Instead, new users get a 14 day free trial, and then must pay $50 per user per year after that trial. Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use.

Earlier this year we reported that the usage caps were being squeezed by Google over time for Google Apps, from 200 users down to just 50. When the service first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.” A paid version first appeared in 2007.

Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, commented on our post that talked about the decreasing number of users allowed for the free version, saying that the cap reductions were needed to keep resellers happy, adding “There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” - we have no plans whatsoever to do that.”

Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.

Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of The Times Of India, the leading English-language daily newspaper in the country.

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.

Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal.

We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well.

The video is below (plus a way to get his new book for free):

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.

That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.

While not every tweak to YouTube’s system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you’ve been editing it and weren’t careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.

Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn’t impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.

Gmail is constantly adding features to help people become more organized. Today, Google has tweaked its Labels feature to add more functionality to the labels toolkit, helping users implement labels in a more organized way. Your labels will now be located in a new area on your Gmail interface, above your chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels. You can also now control which labels you’d like to show on your UI and you can hide the rest under a “more” tab.

Of of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.

Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.

The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat. As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room.You can try out the gadget for yourself here.

Not only does Google want to organize all the world’s information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the world’s population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a fancy iPhone or Android with a Web browser either. I’m talking about $10 cell phones with not much more than voice and SMS capabilities. If Google can reach people, especially in developing nations, with SMS, it can reach everyone with a cell phone.

In Africa, it is launching a suite of SMS services today, including SMS search, Q&A-style tips, and an SMS-based marketplace. The first country to get these services is Uganda.