[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVLsRo7-3Lk[/youtube]Google today have just released a new upgrade to their Android based Google Maps v5.1 which includes check in to their places pages as well as designations as described below:

Latitude is built right into Google Maps for Android so check-ins work across Latitude and Maps seamlessly. For example, check in at that new hamburger joint, and you’ll see its Place page with reviews to help you order. When friends check in at a place, you can go straight from their Latitude profile to its Place page to learn about it, fire up Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for turn-by-turn directions to them, and more.

You can also check in at a favorite place to earn special status there; you’ll see if you’ve become a “Regular,” a “VIP” or a “Guru” on its Place page. Keep checking in to hold onto your status or reach the next level.

If this all sounds familiar (check in, special status) – thats because other applications like Foursquare and Gowalla and Facebook have all had the ability to check into various locations for quite some time. Rather than seeing one large integration social offering from Google it seems we’ll now have a trickling of social enabled applications.

Update: Google Latitude check ins do not yet appear to work with Google Apps for Domains accounts which have been migrated and cannot yet support a Google Profile.

Google Latitude

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In what’s becoming a very sad and regular occurrence the Google Voice system is once again down. Callers to my voice number hear a “you have reached a non-working number” message. Attempts to access the web interface return the above error message.

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Supposedly Google “fixed” their flawed login system which caused mega problems if you regularly used more than one Google account for email or apps. Here’s a great example showing that the Google login is still broken and not any better than before.

In the example before is a Google Apps document that’s been shared to my wayne@s-consult.com account.

When I click to view it — I’m immediately (and incorrectly) logged in as my other Google account (wayne.schulz).

Can you save “hot steaming fail”.

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For the past month or so we’ve been using Manymoon for our project management collaboration. There’s a free version though I paid the $180 or so for a yearly subscription (which is starting to look like a mistake).  Overall, when it works,  it’s a great little tool for it’s tight integration to Google Apps which we use for our internal email, calendar and documents.

Sadly for the past several days the Manymoon service has been largely unreachable for me. I’ve left support a problem report but have yet to hear back from them on what the issue with their service is.

When it is reachable there tends to be an error message related to SSL  connection failures or the speed is unbearably slow. This is a big issue for Google as well because ManyMoon is listed as one of the top installed Google Marketplace Apps! The marketplace is a relatively new location for Google to showcase new Software As A Service (SAAS) applications that integrate tightly with Google Apps.

When Google Marketplace first arrived I was hopeful that there would be lots of applications that could be purchased and integrated to my Google Apps account in a manner similar to how applications are purchased and used on an iPhone or Android device.

Sadly for me that hasn’t happened. Instead what I have experienced is what to me seem half-baked products that tend to partly work.

For example, an earlier experiment with using Kwaga, which purports to “displays profile information from the social web.” resulted in an incoming email from someone who I knew  (luckily) where Kwaga completely mis-identified the person’s picture, web site, social media sites. Emails to the developer uncovered that this was pretty much a known issue.

Sigh. If an application whose primary purpose is to identify your social contacts – fails or is only sometimes correct- what good is it?

Thinking of the Google Apps Marketplace? My recommendation is to stick to the freebies until you’re able to see the applications that charge a fee are stable and in business for the long haul.

Update 7/15/2010: Just spoke with the Manymoon folks. They’re taking steps to ensure this issue doesn’t recur. They have a blog post that explains what happened here and future updates will also be posted to their blog to keep everyone posted.  We continue to use Manymoon to manage our projects and will keep you posted with our experiences.

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As Twitter suffers through another period of sporadic downtime many critics have pointed to Google’s new service Buzz as an example of the type of social media service that doesn’t go down and seems to be able to scale with the number of users that have been adopting it.

The only problem with the comparison is that as of 6:00 am today the Google Buzz site while still displaying Buzz postings seems to be rejecting posts. The latest posts are also not coming in sequential order and scanning quickly the latest live postings appear to be about an hour old.

Edit: Google Buzz is back but definitely not operating at 100%. Images aren’t reliably being attached and the service is having trouble with editing.

Google Buzz

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The Hartford Courant is reporting that Google has admitted to collecting unencrypted Wi-Fi data in the State of Connecticut. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had sent Google a letter seeking information on whether any data was collected by the company’s street view cars.

Google’s acknowledgment that it vacuumed up data from unencrypted wireless computer networks in Connecticut is disturbing and demands additional inquiry,” Blumenthal said. “Google grabbed information—which could include e-mails, passwords, and web-browsing — that consumers rightly expect to be private. Google needs to better explain how this practice happened, exactly when, where and why

Google is facing a number of lawsuits in different states from people who believe their privacy has been invaded when Google’s street view cars drove by taking not only pictures of the road but allegedly collecting data from their unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

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Thankfully Google Voice’s Do not disturb (aka DND) feature has been updated so that you can now specify a period of time for which the phone service should automatically send all callers to voicemail. Prior to this addition the DND feature was convenient for times when you were busy and couldn’t take any calls – except it was all too easy to forget and leave activated thus unintentionally sending all callers to voice mail until you remembered to switch the feature off. Google Voice is a beta service offered by Google which provides a free phone number which in turn can be forwarded to any live phone. The service is useful for people who want to give out one number without worrying that when a number changes (such as a if they purchase a new cell phone) that they don’t have to give out a new number to their friends.

Google Voice

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This morning (actually Wednesday evening – but I just noticed it this morning) Google Wave went live with a new feature that allows for notification of new activity in waves you are participating in. The feature is activated via your inbox and will send an email based on a timeline (immediate, hourly, daily, never) that you decide. More screenshots follow.Here’s where the main notification is set in Google Wave.

Once you’ve enabled the notification Google Wave is smart enough not to send a notification for every single reply. You’ll only get one notification until you go back into the Wave and then the notification for that particular Wave will be reset so that you’ll receive replies.

Here’s what the Gmail inbox notification looks like for a Wave that I’m participating in.

Here are the rules for notifications as per the Google Wave blog:

When you’re added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we’ll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won’t send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won’t trigger updates.

via: Google Wave Blog

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I’ve always been able to upload documents (spreadsheets, documents, presentations) to my Google Apps for Domain account. However until now that was the only type of document that I could store. If I wanted to upload larger files such as images I had to use an alternate file storage system such as Amazon or Drop Box. Last night I first noticed that uploading of other file types to my Google Apps account had gone live. This was announced by Google on Tuesday January 12, 2010.  Total free file storage is 1 GB and added storage can be purchased for .25/GB per year for personal accounts — and $3.50/GB per year for company accounts. Microsoft has been quick to point out that their Sky Drive offers 25 GB of storage per year at no cost (a figure I expect Google will match quickly).  The benefit of Google’s addition of file storage is that it brings those of us using Google Apps one step closer to our ultimate goal of storing all of our data in the clouds and eliminating need for a locally maintained server.

Store and share files in the clouds with Google Docs

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