We all know that Google has Google Docs and has been trying to promote that as a cheap and readily available version of an office suite. However, there has always been something missing from the suite of applications. We have GMail, and Google Calendar, and the addition of Tasks. I remember asking why they would create a Tasks application when so many good options existed. Because the various applications are still somewhat disjointed, and the announcements have come at all sorts of times, I had only one brief moment of insight which I totally forgot about yesterday.

Let me put all the stories we have heard in the past 6 or 9 months together with what we know so far. Google Docs is Google’s lightweight answer to Microsoft Office. It is incomplete in comparison. GMail gets offline access and shortly after adds the Tasks feature. We also have Chrome, the browser, which allows you to create a shortcut on the desktop that makes online applications look almost like a desktop application. Now we have Chrome OS which really makes the browser as close to an operating system as we have seen. To top it all off, Google recently hid the standard edition of Google Apps, later apologized for it and put a tiny link for it under the big signup button for the paid edition. Last but not least is Google Wave, which many screenshots have shown looks somewhat similar to Microsoft Outlook.

By now, you should see where I am going with this. ChromeOS is Google’s way of getting a platform for their future cash cow, Google Apps. Microsoft Office has been raking in the money for years, and Google wants a piece. The main reason for this success is that Microsoft always had an advantage over other office suite competitors, they owned the platform. Google is trying to give away the platform so that they can focus on generating tons of revenue with Google Apps. There is a huge whole that they can fill with small businesses. Small businesses do not want to pay for the various licenses of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange. They also do not want to pay for the salaries required to maintain the various servers in that infrastructure. With Google Apps, we have a very reasonable subscription of $50 per year per user. This is for an office suite and a mail server, all of which you never have to install or administer.

This is a plan to go after the heart of Microsoft’s business. Even if Microsoft releases an MS Office in the cloud as some are speculating, Microsoft is almost considered the underdog on the internet. Unless the Office release is free and utterly fantastic, people will consider it a failure. The stakes are high with the online office suites, and Microsoft does not have a good history of implementing services on the internet. We are in for a good fight, and that typically means lots of new features and innovation. Regardless of which company wins, this likely means that we, the users, are the ones that really win.

One thing I did realize is that it is not in competition with Firefox or any other browser. This is competition directly aimed at Microsoft Windows. This is fairly obvious, when on the welcome page, creating “application shortcuts” is highlighted.

If you click through to the post that is linked, it should look familiar. Yes, it is my blog and my opinion, and I just wanted to say “I told you so” In all seriousness, this is not a surprising move for Google as they have been trying to get on the desktop for what seems like an eternity. You could go as far back as the release of Google Gears to really get a sense of it.

The official announcement was made late last night and almost every tech blog known to man is covering it. Here are the more important parts:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

The OS is going to be open source and is really just a windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. Obviously, this is a play more to netbooks than traditional desktops. However, anyone that follows the computer industry knows that laptops have continuously gained marketshare, so this is a simple attempt for mainstream acceptance using a somewhat limited beta test.

The other side of this is that it could render tablet PCs obsolete before they get off the ground. Not surprisingly, Louis Gray already thought about that:

The focus on those people who spend most of their time on the Web sounds like it would be in very close proximity with the CrunchPad I covered over the weekend, but funded by a company with thousands of employees, not a few dozen.

Basically, Google has known that mobile computing is the future for quite some time. They already have a phone OS in Android, and now they have a Netbook OS with Chrome. If you already have most of your documents online using Google Docs or Zoho, what do you really need a standard operating system like Windows for? If the Linux kernel is there for basic device support and printing support,  what else is needed? As a consumer operating system, what is simpler than a browser?

I do have a few minor notes based on other ideas I have in my head or heard on the interwebs. It will take a long time for this to become a developer operating system. Eventually it could happen, but there is a lot of work needed for something like that. Also, this is not targeted at Apple at all. Apple has often expressed their disdain for netbooks and if they ever do come out with a tablet computer, it will be all pretty and people will buy it anyway. Apple has always loved form over function, so their tablet would likely be a beautiful machine. Plenty of people have bought into the iPhone and iPod OS as well, so the OS war for mobile computing could become a three horse race of Google Chrome, Google Android and Apple.

TechCrunch reported earlier today that the Standard Edition of Google Apps had disappeared. Based on the image in their post, you can see the comparison of the Standard Edition and the Premium Edition. This comparison no longer exists, but the Standard Edition does seem to be available:

You can actually still see the free version at this page. But it doesn’t appear to be linked to from any Google page at this point.

So, what happened and why does this matter? First, it looks like Google is putting the focus on the business and paying customers. The new choices, besides personal usage, are in the image below.

As you can see, you can select Business or School. If you select the Business option, you will see a group of links at the bottom of the page pointing back to schools, to non-profits and other choices. If you then click the non-profits link, you get to a normal marketing page with a big signup button which you need to click. When you click that button, you receive the standard business account page which has a “Begin Free Trial” button. Beneath the button is some text:

Not a business? Explore Standard Edition

Once you have reached this page (finally!), you can create your standard account as you did previously.

Now that we now what happened, we need to answer the why. Why did Google hide the standard edition under so many clicks? The point is to have more people using the Premier Edition, obviously. The Standard Edition was their way of building a significant user base. Now they are trying to upsell everyone else. Is this a significant move? Somewhat.

It is significant in that one of the standard bearers of “free” has decided to hide the free option of their software. It is not significant because this is the standard evolution in the freemium model. The big difference here is that Google is very big and constantly in the spotlight, so their every move is analyzed and criticized. The premium version also does not cost that much. $50 per year per user (or just over $4 per month), is very little money to pay for free email management and an office software suite. The premium version is still a great deal for a startup that does not want to use “mycompany@gmail.com” or try to administer their own email servers.

In reality, this should not be significant news, but it will definitely get some attention. However, the irony of this happening on the day that the Free book is released is just too perfect.

If you’re building your site for the web savvy, that’s quite a different crowd than the “my kids just got me onto Facebook” set. How do you accommodate both? It’s probably not just as simple as putting a phone number on every web page, but that wouldn’t hurt. But then, is it about your website at all?

The idea is that there are a lot of people who read blogs, some of which you never intended to reach. In my case, I figured that I would reach developers mostly, and some of those tech people interested in social media. However, because I write about “conversations” and “audiences” at times, I have had discussions with educators, librarians and journalists. These are people I never intended to target, but I have purely by accident.

When dealing with the FeedBurner changes, Jorge Escobar felt that an audience is an audience:

if you and your blog are one (which is my personal case) and my blog headlines are being seen along with other headlines (which is what happens in any RSS reader as well as in FriendFeed) there is a valid point that people are subscribing to my content and could be counted as part of my audience.

Granted, I am taking this quote completely out of its original context, but the meaning is that people subscribed to Jorge on FriendFeed are looking at all of his content, including his blog. However, the people on FriendFeed have subscribed to you, the person, because they found you interesting.

So, how do we distinguish between those people that subscribe directly to your post and those that “passively” subscribe through something like FriendFeed? Should we write content, be it on the blog or a simple comment on FriendFeed and Twitter, that caters to all of the people that may read it? Or do we write content specific to the audience that may be reading?

For example, this blog is technical so most topics stay fairly technical (except things like today). On FriendFeed, things are still somewhat technical, but there is much more “conversational” topics as well like a virtual watercooler. On Twitter, I stay somewhat technical with a few other bits of commentary, but mostly in the social media topic. So, where do we draw the line? How do we deal with each audience differently? Should we deal with each audience differently?

I know this is some significant rambling on a Monday morning, but with the proliferation of social services, there is a definite distinction between these potential audiences. The question ends up being, do we care what knowledge the reader has? Using Chris Brogan’s example, someone who just got onto Facebook probably will not read this blog directly, and probably shouldn’t. However, they may enjoy reading some of the content I aggregate using FriendFeed. This is more due to the nature of the way that FriendFeed works as well.

Audiences tend to grow organically as well. People that have found my content on FriendFeed may have found it completely indirectly. As an example, Louis Gray subscribed to me ages ago. Robert Scoble could have found me through Louis recommendation, and Alex Scoble found me because of his brother Robert. Alex is very active on FriendFeed with tons of people who are not really technical, so there is a completely different group of people that are now exposed to content they likely would not have seen before.

Due to this ever-changing group of people, it reinforces our need to be “natural”. Do we try to force our content to fit all of the potential readers? Absolutely not. If I tried to reach all of the people that have subscribed in some way, the content here would become very generic. I would need to find the commonality between all of these groups of people. If you tried to find some topic that all of these people were interested in, you would probably fail. That is, you would fail until you realized that the commonality is you and your content. If these people have subscribed to your content, they know that some days you will write something they are not interested in.

So, are audiences different? Absolutely. Do we need to talk to each audience differently? Overall, we probably are, just due to the variety of content that we produce. Should we try to reach everyone with every post? Absolutely not, because we would be diluting the value of what we post. In any case, the need to keep the content “natural” must be remembered or we could lose our audience.

In the past week, we saw the ever reliable Rackspace go down, taking a whole bunch of sites with it. Just a few days later, Authorize.net went down due to a fire. TechCrunch relates the seriousness of this outage:

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites…

Now, imagine if you are an ecommerce website like Toys R Us. Your host, or even your CDN, goes down. If this is during your peak season (Nov. and Dec.), you could lose millions of dollars … in an hour. If your payment processing goes down, the situation becomes more interesting. You cannot make transactions, but your site still looks live. This is potentially more frustrating for customers, who may have been willing to wait for an outage to clear. The “odd errors” customers are likely to see when part of the infrastructure goes down, could cause them to go to another site for their purchases. So, what should you do?

First, if you are a major ecommerce site, you should ensure that your main hosting services are properly redundant. So, if your hosting provider loses a data center, your site should not be impacted. This is not necessary, or affordable,  for smaller sites, but for ecommerce you need to ensure reliability. The main idea with an ecommerce site is that you need to “keep the lights on”. What if your favorite provider does not have redundancy across data centers? In this case, you should look into a smaller and cheaper hosting provider as backup. If you always have your site deployed to a backup server, you can quickly redirect services to the backup site. Granted, their are a lot of pieces in this idea, like the DNS and database servers, but if you have the potential of losing significant revenue due to an outage of one hour you have to take precautions. In some cases, you could even be using these backup servers as external beta servers, so that you do not feel like you are throwing away money.

In the case of Authorize.net’s outage, you can take an example from Twitter. Whenever Twitter has had high loads or general database problems, they turn off a feature like searching. As annoying as that feels from the user perspective, they manage to keep the lights on, but with a limited feature set. Going back to the ecommerce example, if your check processing provider goes down, it would be nice to be able to turn them off, but still accept other forms of payment. Even more impressive would be the ability to quickly switch from one provider to another. Wouldn’t you rather accept payments for a limited number of payment methods, than not accept payments at all? Maybe you can still generate 50% of your normal revenue during that time.

I am assuming most of my readers do not run ecommerce sites, but there is a lot we can learn from these issues. Even a social media application like Twitter wants to maintain as much uptime as possible. So, they turn off search capabilities for a little while. Almost any application can benefit from the ability to turn off a specific feature at any given time. What are you doing for your site to keep the lights on?

Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters,  where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day.

So, outside of emergencies and major breaking news, do people know what to use the real time web for? The mass consumer likely does not. This can be seen in the comments that Facebook receives as they inch closer to becoming the main real-time platform. Why have “the masses” not been converted into real-time zealots? This is probably due to the lack of a defining problem.

Valeria Maltoni wrote a somewhat related post today regarding the “Social Media Program Lifecycle“. The basic idea is that a marketing campaign that uses social media goes through a lifecycle, and you can expect to see a certain level of “buzz” during each part of the lifecycle. In the post, she describes a graph that visualizes the “dynamics of attention”:

…distinguishes between the actions of the company and/or agency, which are designed to create higher, artificial buzz, and the reactions of the public involved. You can see in the graphic, how those generate lower buzz, yet genuine (here we say authentic) engagement.

I recommend you read the post to get the full idea, but also notice something very important. There are zero mentions of the real-time web or Twitter specifically. Facebook is mentioned, but only in the applications perspective. Blogs and reviews are mentioned, but more in the terms of engagement. Valeria is well respected in this arena, so why does she omit mentions of real-time?

As much as it pains me to say this, the “real time web” is currently in a hype cycle and is a solution in search of a problem. The breaking news usages will not make a revenue-generating industry around this. There has to be some problem, some pain that this solves. We have seen some possibilities with reputation and brand monitoring, but that is highly focused within the more marketing aspects of any business. Is there some larger problem this solves? We cannot really say that instant communication is the game-changing thing, because instant messaging broke that barrier years ago.

Twitter probably is not the real long-term winner for the real-time web. Twitter, and the concept of status updates, is really just an enabler. What problems can the real-time web solve? And what type of application will really solve that problem? Whoever figures that out will be worth a lot of money.

This is the internet and the way it works. Get used to it.

Jesse Stay points to the general concept as well.

The problem with today’s “Groundswell” is it now targets the personal brand as well as the corporation. We see that in Arrington’s situation, as well as several others that have recently been targeted. It could have happened on Twitter. It could have happened on Youtube, or Digg, or anywhere else. The fact is when someone the majority likes is targeted, or the service the majority likes is targeted, or has the appearance of being attacked, the mob goes in defense mode, attacking back.

Personal feelings become more involved now because we are more directly involved. If we go back a few years, the only place people could comment about a blog post was on the blog itself. Now, there is Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed and a whole lot more. Now there are several places where the mob can form, but some places it may be more likely than others.

Steven Hodson mentions part of the reason that we see this behavior.

As with human nature, and anything we touch, there is always a negative side, the dirty side of the story that no-one likes to talk about or admit to. The same applies to Social Media and we see it rear its ugly with every case of Internet flash mobs of hate and recrimination.

You can see human nature pushing through on almost every social media site. If you get something controversial on Digg, I bet that the comments will be just as bad as those Arrington mentioned from FriendFeed, maybe even worse. The problem that arises on some sites is that all of the comments are together, as in Digg and FriendFeed. Sites like Twitter do not have as much of a problem because they have comments strewn throughout a stream. The big difference is that when the comments are centralized, a conversation or argument ensues. On Twitter, there may be a few @replies, but it is much harder to maintain a conversation.

So, why blame FriendFeed specifically? Why not blame Digg, the father of all things comment related? Obviously, you really can’t blame the platform, because they did not make the comments. They can apologize for being an enabler, but that is as far as it goes. If you blame the people, things become more difficult. This is the internet where anonymity rules, so you don’t always know who you are dealing with.

I would say let’s just all act like adults and treat each other with respect, but I know that will not happen overall. You can choose what conversations you get involved in. If you see a thread that talks about you in a bad way, be the bigger person and do not join the fight. If you have a platform as popular as TechCrunch, I would believe that there is more power in a blog post than a single thread on FriendFeed. Will you get nasty comments on the blog? Yes, but you do not need to respond to them either.

So, how do we get around this problem? Steven Hodson thinks we need a John Lennon for social media. Honestly, I think we have to accept it for what it is. This is the internet. You can choose to ignore some of the hate and vitriol, or you can be overcome by it.

So, I may be called stupid for this, but they have given the average user far too many options, and they get confusing. One bright spot is the simplicity of sharing all of the media types. If you look at the image below, you will see the image that most blogs have included.

What people seem to have conveniently missed are the rest of the options. Most blogs have been excited about the inclusion of the “Everyone” option. My problem is that they just made this sharing process complicated. So, you can choose Everyone, your Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends or Friends. That way, you have some list sharing capabilities that Twitter does not have. FriendFeed does have similar options, so this is not entirely new functionality, just an incremental improvement again. Then there is the last option, Customize. This brings you to a popup that allows you to customize who can see the message. This is where things get really confusing.

The idea is that you can select multiple options for the share, or hide it from specific people. Obviously, there is a lot of power here, but this is getting more difficult than just sharing a status update. This is becoming a messaging platform. This is also overly complicated. If I want to share with a few people, or multiple lists, I have to click at least 3 times after typing in my update.

This is yet another area where Facebook could learn from FriendFeed. FriendFeed recently added the ability to share a message with multiple people. You can see how they do this in the image below. First you see “My Feed”, and I typed in “building43″ which was “autocompleted”. I can keep typing in various names of people, groups and rooms. It is completely unobtrusive, and feels just like an email. More importantly, it is really simple with autocomplete.

Most likely, we will see a few changes in these sharing options before they are released to everyone. If they do not, they really run the risk of people not changing anything about what they do. Facebook has some good ideas here, and could solidify their position by making it really simple. If they don’t, there will probably be tons of people complaining about the latest thing they don’t like about Facebook. Hopefully, they realize how to change this and they do it quickly. I am not sure if I can take another batch of complaints like we heard about the home page.