Chat and e-mail

Google is making major inroads in the education sector.

The company announced yesterday that the University of Connecticut has initiated a changeover to Google Apps for Education. According to David Gilbertson, the school's chief information officer, the search giant's platform will be used for the students' "e-mail and calendar platform."

"After contacting other major universities which recently moved students to Google Apps, we are confident that this change will bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole," Gilbertson recently wrote on the university's Web site.

Harvard is also getting … Read more

Those of you who use or want to try out Gmail's voice calling feature to make phone calls can now set up multiple calls at the same time.

Unveiled almost a year ago, Gmail's phone call feature lets you make calls to other Gmail users as well as to regular cell phones and landlines. Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free, while calls abroad typically cost a few pennies per minute. The feature even includes video chatting.

Until now, you could only make one phone call at a time. But in a recent update to the … Read more

When Apple showed off Mac OS X Lion at the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote speech earlier this year, it was clear the company had paid attention to its successes with the popular iOS devices, and was now beginning to include successful iOS features in its flagship OS.

Also, with Apple laptops and tablets now far outpacing desktop sales, Apple has moved from a primarily desktop computer company to embrace mobile computing. This release of Mac OS X seems to be a reflection of Apple's successes in those categories.

With this eighth major release of the big-cat OS, Apple is … Read more

What happens when you combine social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook with cloud-based services from Google and make them all accessible from one desktop service? The new program called MultiMi (download) gives you access to all those accounts and lets you share items to contacts across the board using drag and drop.

"The objective of the product itself is to give them one centralized location to receive and manage their information," said Eidan Apelbaum, CEO of MultiMi's publisher, ZBang It.

Pronounced "multi me," the Windows-only program supports a wide range of services out of the … Read more

Google is accelerating a test of corporate accounts on Google+ after "thousands upon thousands" of businesses applied for a place in the program, a Google executive said.

The company plans next week to choose who'll get into the test and announce their names soon afterward, Christian Oestlien, a Google product manager, said in a Google+ post last night.

But if you want your company, brand name, school, or celebrity pet to have a place on Google sooner rather than later, you'd better act fast. Google is closing down its applications form on Friday, he said.

"… Read more

Google Voice users who have been marking calls as spam now have something to show for their troubles.

"Thanks to the help of the thousands of Google Voice users who mark calls as spam everyday--and our own spam identification tools--it is now possible to automatically redirect calls, texts, and voicemails from any of the numbers in our database directly into your spam folder," the search company said on its Google Voice blog yesterday.

Spam filtering has long been a desire of Google Voice users. Previously, when telemarketers would call a Google Voice user, they could still block the … Read more

Google, trying to take a stand with its new social network, requires people to use real-world names on Google+. The real world, though, turns out to be more complex than a simple rule can accommodate.

Now two weeks old and growing like a weed, Google+ is facing issues that became common once the Internet made people's identity into information that can reach potentially anyone on the planet. With Google+ and the Google Profiles service on which it relies, the company is trying to build a service without pseudonyms, anonymous cowards, or impersonation.

"Google Profiles is a product that works best in the identified state. This way you can be certain you're connecting with the right person, and others will have confidence knowing that there is someone real behind the profile they're checking out," according to the Google help files for Google+. "For this reason, Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life."

Most people are known by the name that appears on their driver's license or school registry and probably won't think twice about using that when joining a social network. There are plenty of advantages to that approach: anonymous forums are often degraded by trolling, attacks, and flame wars. Using real names brings some measure of accountability, since your reputation is on the line when you voice an opinion.

But there are acres of gray area, too. Political dissidents may want to avoid persecution. Those who've been harassed may want to avoid more of it. And plenty of people want both online interactions and privacy. … Read more

Google+ appears to be in the midst of a population explosion.

A statistical analysis by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and chief executive of Facebook app maker FamilyLink.com, concludes that the Google+ population reached 7.3 million on Sunday, July 10, and likely will reach 10 million today.

And if Google keeps the Google+ invitation button active, as it has since Sunday, Allen expects Google+ to reach 20 million users by this weekend, he said in a Google+ post late Monday night.

"The user base is growing so quickly that it is challenging for me to keep … Read more

Open-Xchange's tool for helping people reconstruct their Facebook contact list on Google+ has fallen victim to Facebook's revocation of its privileges.

Open-Xchange, a maker of open-source e-mail and collaboration software, last week launched a tool that used the company's Social OX technology to help people assemble a list of their friends. It used connections to a combination of services such as LinkedIn and e-mail accounts to create a single "magic address book."

The tool didn't actually copy e-mail addresses from Facebook--only first and last names. It then matched those names to other e-mail records in the user's accounts. But Facebook disabled the API (application programming interface) key that the software used to read the names, Open-Xchange Chief Executive Rafael Laguna said.

Facebook gave two reasons for the move and underscored the seriousness of its decision with a warning about the repercussions: … Read more