Official Gmail Blog: A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence

"We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site's home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request."

All I need to do to speed up Gmail's web interface is go check my mail at Yahoo or MSN, after that the Gmail interface seems MUCH faster.

Google Press Center: News Announcement

'Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social,' said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. 'Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality.'

Analysis: Dems wonder about Clinton exit strategy - Yahoo! News

'It just takes time for the candidate to realize it's over, for the campaign to realize it's over and for everyone to deal with that in some sort of responsible way,' said Bill Carrick, a California-based strategist who has worked on winning as well as losing presidential campaigns.

'From my point of view, there's very little benefit for sticking it out. You just run up more and more debts and you become increasingly irrelevant to the process.'

Spreading OpenSocial Across the Web

"Paul Buchheit wrote last year that 'there's no such thing as a social network'. The social aspect of a site is just one of its many features. 'Real products need more functionality in order to somehow deliver value to their users. It is this other functionality that defines the real purpose of a product, not the social network, which exists only to enable or enhance the core purpose.'"

Meantime Facebook bleeds talent or goes to India looking for a miracle working guru. Microsoft transitions executives over to the charity wing.

Google brings Friend Connect to the masses | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

"As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming."

Gates Foundation Names Microsoft Veteran as CEO - WSJ.com

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tapped a respected Microsoft Corp. executive to lead it into its next phase, a period that will bring rapid expansion to the foundation, the world's largest private philanthropy."

Bonus: No need to mess around with those silly P&L spreadsheets any more!

Does Being Ethical Pay? - WSJ.com

"To find out, we conducted a series of experiments. We showed consumers the same products -- coffee and T-shirts -- but told one group the items had been made using high ethical standards and another group that low standards had been used. A control group got no information.

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount."

What Google Knows About Spam

Now Go Away or We Shall Taunt You a Second Time | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

So many of Microsoft's mistakes are characterized by their inability to consider the possibility of losing on an issue such as this (or a hostile take-over for another example). This, in spite of the fact that they've had numerous failed products, lost legal battles, devastating (to their customers) security exposures. The company's name is becoming a modern synonym for "hubris".

Only one company comes to mind for me when it comes to not being easily confused by the facts: SCO

To Be Fair, Sales Figures Were Limited to Consumers Willing to Admit Owning a Zune | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD