A few weeks ago, Google announced a new plug-in that would sync Google’s enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar with Microsoft’s Outlook. This was a big deal because it not only made it simple for users seamlessly integrate both email applications but it also represented Google’s push to become a serious player in the enterprise apps space where Outlook is still overwhelmingly popular. Unfortunately, Google’s plug-in had some major faults.

Most notably, the bug didn’t allow users find emails using Windows Desktop Search, essentially making the search feature useless. Today, Google announced that it fixed the problem. The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you have the option of searching within the native Outlook search or Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook.

Google says they’ve also added the ability to access Windows Live Hotmail via the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector plug-in. Google has also launched a Google Apps resource site that is a centralized place for resources and info for businesses which are looking to switch from a Microsoft Exchange environment. The site includes information about Google Apps, FAQs, and customer feedback from those who have switched from Exchange to Google Apps.

Today I got a call from my sister about our other sister. When the phone rings from one family member to another, and it’s not birthday season, it’s always bad news. Our other sister, because that’s how we always called her, was dead. She was the adopted daughter of our father’s third marriage, and she was a very unhappy, angry person who the rest of us had a hard time liking, or even caring about.

At various times I’ve felt guilty about my attitude toward her, not wishing ill of someone who had such a hard time with life. But honestly, in the end she could be downright mean and nasty. Eventually I grew hardened and suspicious, resentful of her attempts to brush aside years of similar behavior with others of her siblings. I feel bad about her sad life, but that’s about all I can muster.

As this played out this afternoon, so did a quarrel between two friends on the network. The trigger, but not the root, of this was the demise of the Gillmor Gang some weeks ago. In the aftermath of that event, the realtime world of FriendFeed and to some extent Twitter seemed caught in an ugly spiral of what Mike Arrington calls mob behavior. I share Mike’s alarm at this wave of off-the-cuff vitriol, even as I continue to be at least partially blamed for the drama that swirled around our show.

I’ve tried to stay out of the controversy, other than to speak my mind during the attempt at talking through the incident in a restarted show. I even took my show’s archives down as a way of indicating how strongly I felt about the tone with which many people spoke about members of the cast and myself. I’ve enjoyed producing the show through its many incarnations and participants, and have felt for the weeks since then that something would have to change before we could return to our sessions. Today’s continued vitriol over Mike’s attempts to frame the seriousness of the issue don’t bode well.

I’m 60 years old and have always felt proud of what I’ve tried to do in my career as a journalist, filmmaker, producer, and whatever my role in the Gang could be called. I take my work seriously, and have always tried to take others’ seriously as well. Sometimes I am guilty of hyperbole and failed attempts at humor; I don’t suffer slights and insinuations with the best of grace, and stumble far more than those whose work I admire and attempt to match. I most often err on the side of silence, hoping to say nothing with as much or more impact as wading in.

We need to fix this problem, whether it’s called realtime or social media, or whatever. We need to recognize that words mean something, and those that are thrown casually or viciously carry the same force as weapons. As a community, we must begin to own that responsibility, to make it clear that disagreement can be expressed without name calling, that fighting for innovation and progress does not excuse ugliness and slander, that we live in a world where news travels fast and emotions faster. We need to own our words, and we need to help each other to understand when we go too far.

I can understand when people make mistakes, when their passion gets the better of them. But saying nothing while people heap scorn and ugliness on others needs to stop. We must learn to separate argument from personal attacks. No one is immune from this criticism. I have failed at this regularly, even as I pretty it up with humor and caustic silence. It’s easy to want an eye for an eye, but we have to start somewhere to break the cycle. If that means I need to say what I mean instead of waiting for others, so be it.

When I got off the call with my sister, I told her that even though I didn’t want to admit it, the bad news could have been a lot worse. I wished my other sister no ill will, but thank god it wasn’t any of the others. I have to live with that feeling about myself, that sometimes things go too far and there’s no turning back. If I’ve gone too far down that road with any of you, I apologize. Let’s try and work toward less of this ugliness, and failing that, figure out a way to share in a community of people who respect some sort of rules about discourse.

Distributed call-center outsourcing service LiveOps has launched Livework, new venture that uses crowdsourcing to manage and implement a workforce in the cloud. Livework lets businesses outsource process work to distributed teams of experts and agents, all in a dynamic, on-demand environment in the cloud.

Livework is basically a marketplace for outsourcing projects. Any client can advertise the need for virtual work on the platform and work providers can find projects or advertise their services on the site. Companies can operate virtual service storefront, and can bid for workers. Each worker’s profile includes information about their work history, reputation etc.

Launched a few months ago, Livework’s marketplace is powered by Liveops’ 20,000 U.S. home based telephone workers. Their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Livework uses the results-based routing to schedule works.

The top agents make three times more than the average agent. Liveops says the the marketplace is getting about 3,000 applications for work per week but only 50 agents are accepted per week. Businesses can have real-time visibility on work progress on the platform and have the ability to create reports at any time. Liveops takes a cut of the money a business pays to outsourcers.

It seems that Liveops is launching this service in an environment that is ripe for the offering. More and more companies are looking to the cloud as a platform for operations and Liveops is offering a place for workers to find work in an economy where unemployment rates are peaking. Competitors to Liveops include Skyclick and oDesk.

A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good.

Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new facts obviate old ones and alliances switch to account for new alignments. In Twitter’s case, the early instability and the high stakes involved made for a great deal of passion and attendant posturing. We all took it personally (well, I did) when Twitter removed key features that favored serendipity and discovery. Until then, we felt the new space Twitter opened up was like the Old West, expanding outward without sense of limit or control.

It wasn’t that Track was the most useful part of the service. It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries. Taking it away hardened the service into its fundamental structure, the familiar limits of space and time, the tenuous constructs of “friend” and “follow” rather than the surprise of the unfamiliar appearing suddenly with fresh ideas and humor. Before Track went away, we never knew what would happen next; afterward, we knew enough to not anticipate.

In a similar way, 140 characters felt less like a limitation and more like an invitation to be surprised at how much you could squeeze into the frame. Like perspective in a painting, or echo in a recording, the creative use of limitations helped us overcome gravity and imagine more than we could “see.” Supporting the limits became a creative validation of the surprise that Twitter has always been. How many events and ideas must we share before we get over that surprise, that once again Twitter has exceeded expectations?

140 characters brought us url shorteners, the key to this new self-compressing and auto-expanding universe. Our software is now compensating for the microURL opacity, unpacking these links and harvesting the metadata they carry to aid indexing of the gestures they contain. Once again, the apparent limitations of the shorteners (gas station on every corner, lurking potential runaway code, mom and pop businesses closing down and orphaning links) are creating investment opportunities and entrepreneurial enclaves.

It’s a little like the present wrapped in a series of enclosed boxes, where the joke of what’s in the big box is replaced by the joke of how small something can get before it is even more valuable. Twitter continues to confound the experts, even those who are getting rich with and around it. That’s because the real value of Twitter is the one thing that will remain secret — its ability to delight. It’s not for Ev or Biz or even Fred or Marc to own. It doesn’t matter what it’s called either.

In a way, it’s been a blessing that Track has remained locked away in the Tower. It’s given us continued license to dream of what could be when it inevitably returns. We watch as FriendFeed explores the realtime conversations Track first alerted us to. We note Facebook’s timorous steps with the Everyone button, today’s realtime chat alliance with uStream, the media musings about a Facebook Search that would produce higher value targeted results. We even see iPhone 3.0 search reach back from the device to Google servers for results. It’s all Track on the way back.

Will we still have dreams when Track returns? Yes, just like we will have dreams when 140 characters doesn’t go away. Is 140 characters enough room to say we need more? Well, then, we’re good.

Yesterday the WSJ reported of the Iranian government using deep packet inspection technology to censor and monitor Internet activity throughout the country. Deep packet inspection (DPI) is essentially a method through which network operators can delve into individual IP packets to develop an understanding of the type of content flowing through their networks. In the case of Iran, the technology was purportedly used to block certain types of content from being accessed within the country. Similar, less invasive tactics have also been employed in China.

Though reports of this nature present DPI as an emerging technology facilitating the invasion of privacy, DPI has long been used in IT departments for a variety of purposes. Jay Botelho of WildPackets, a DPI technology provider with several enterprise clients, informed us of how the technology is utilized in the enterprise space.

Botelho explained that DPI is most commonly used for network troubleshooting. For instance, if a network hold up occurs, DPI technology allows one to reduce congestion by prioritizing traffic or reallocating portions to other branches of the network. DPI is also widely used to protect corporate networks from viruses and spyware by identifying and filtering out packets with malicious content. More recently, IT departments have turned to the technology to obtain a more comprehensive view of network performance. WildPackets, along with competitors NetScout and Network Instruments, for instance, all offer suites that monitor and provide quick summary-level reports of applications running across a network.

In sum, though deep packet inspection has recently been portrayed as an emerging technology utilized by government agencies, the technology has existed in the enterprise for several years. It is only now, with rich media flowing through the Web with incredible abundance and speed that governments are utilizing the technology to control the flow of content and slow the proliferation of ideas. As social media continues to abound, it is also conceivable that IT departments may further utilize DPI to squelch out social media before it renders them obsolete.

PerfectForms, a company that lets businesses build online forms, surveys and applications without any code, is launching a cloud-based software service to accompany its on-premise offering. PerfectForms lets anyone create custom web-based forms for a variety of tasks, from simple HR routines like vacation requests or new hires, to intricate product management projects.

Using a drag and drop editor, you can easily build forms within minutes. The forms can be integrated with LDAP, databases and other existing CRMs. The software and on-premise solution give users automatic reminders when action is required in forms and will create customized detailed reports on data, project tracking and workflow.

Tom Allanson, CEO of PerfectForms, says that the cloud-based offering may be appealing to enterprises because there’s no software or hardware to maintain, no upfront investment, and best of all, the cost is only $30 per month per license. The on-premise solutions costs $600 per license. That being said, businesses have to feel comfortable with putting confidential and sensitive information in the cloud, which could be an issue for many enterprises. Competitors in this space include Oracle’s PeopleSoft.

How long will it take for the market to capitulate to the rise of Twitter? You’d think with Oprah and Iran and whatever the next micro-event will become, the so-called pundits of old and new media would stop beating the dead horse of Twitter vulnerability. Certainly they’ve mostly slowed down, overwhelmed by the daily startups, the late night jokes, and the mainstream Macarena over the service.

But still there’s this undercurrent of calling the next Twitter, which of course would vanish if Twitter was verified as the current victor. Instead, we hear that 140 characters is too few, that centralization is good, or bad, or useful but transitional, that realtime is too fast, too hard, impossible to keep up with, that business models are here, never coming, etc. The Twitter industry apparently depends on this chatter to continue to smooth out the flow between celebrity and parochial events.

So let’s see how things would play out if we all agreed Twitter is dominant and will not be defeated by any competitor in ts new space, just like we’ve all agreed Google search continues to dominate. Bing’s good effort only reinforces Google’s invulnerability, and you could make the case that Facebook’s recent usernames and reported default Everyone newstream moves do the same for Twitter. A few diehards posit Identica as a viable competitor, and FriendFeed continues to grow despite its founders’ rejection of their product as a direct competitor.

The central question is whether Twitter is a fundamental service of the new realtime network. The answer is yes. So why does the churn continue over competition for that role? Is it to maintain some rationale for deal flow in the Valley or the larger venture space? Despite a steady drumbeat of new entrants in the client and sub-service ecosystem, the dollars flowing are still relatively small. Partly that’s because cloud computing has made investment more of a marketing than a technology buy.

No, the excitement over realtime is real, and transcends the investment dynamics. It’s more of a classic shift from one era to the next, where we’ll look back in short order (a year at the most) and see the moment this became something more than the story of a company. Looked at through the 20-20 lense of hindsight, that moment may be imminent.

What more do we need to know? The explosive viral nature of Twitter URL citations has upended the television networks. YouTube video of the death of a young Iranian woman spread worldwide over Twitter within seconds, completely outside the mainstream media networks and the control of any government or corporation. Twitter executives responded to pleas from concerned users by canceling maintenance downtime during crucial moments in the Iranian demonstrations. The use of realtime transcended the politics of the technology.

The technology also took a big step forward with the release of iPhone 3GS. Its improved camera, autofocus, onboard editing and YouTube auto upload mandate the proliferation of realtime news and communications. Realtime streaming from events and “Breaking Links” for on demand news will quickly become the way we stay informed. Commentary will flow around aggregations of these streams to provide context and debate. The mainstream networks will not fight this; they will use the same tools, and in the process become indistinguishable from the bloggers they’ve borrowed from.

This is not a slow process. It’s explosive in its ferocity. The Breaking News stories today in the New York TImes iPhone app were dominated by the Iran coverage. Here the newspaper of record provided deep context for the realtime news network, not competing but collaborating with the new model. The pressure on the cable networks to reengage will grow enormously over the next few weeks, as MSNBC and CNN try and provide some intermediation between realtime Twitter news and the TImes’ and BBC’s deep bench.

This is not a story of old versus new. This is the moment when it becomes obvious to a broad audience with enormous buying power that the means of creation and distribution are now open at a level where most anyone can reach a defined audience. These micro audiences are small in number but vast in their overlapping circles of influence. Twitter follow clouds ripple outward via retweets and FriendFeed and Facebook Likes, reaching 2 or 3 degrees of separation in seconds, 6 in minutes. The daily news shows are reruns. The cable networks are Best Of replays endlessly recycling, the Hourly Show.

For months we’ve been experimenting with realtime streaming, realtime chatting, realtime aggregation, realtime filtering. Not everything is in place, but enough for those who see no choice but to engage with the speed of the times. It’s scary to watch how powerful these tools are, what potential they have for misuse or worse. The communities that are forming around realtime technology need to accept both the promise and the threat of this moment. In a realtime world we all live in glass houses, and it’s our job to take care of the garden as if it was our own. Which it is.

Devver, a TechStars startup, is releasing its developer service to speed up running Ruby testing frameworks. Currently in private beta, Devver runs tests in parallel on their cloud, completing test suites in as little as 1/3 of the time it would take on a developer’s machine.

Devver says that using their cloud-based system, which splits up processing to multiple machines, it can run full test suites many times faster than in a typical developer environment. In addition, Devver is building features that will reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, generate rich reports, and make it simple to share data between local and distributed developers. The product should be particularly useful in encouraging developer best practices — ie, not skipping a run of the full test suite before deploying a critical bug fix.

There are security issues to what Devver is offering, as companies must hand over their source code to third-party servers. But for Devver, there may be a sweet spot in finding companies who want faster testing and aren’t big or bureaucratic enough to care. Devver points to the success of GitHub, Engine Yard and Heroku as validation of cloud-based, ruby-focused services for the developer crowd. Further, they say that they will add functionality for PHP, Python, and Java testing frameworks in the future.

In October of 2008, Devver raised a $500,000 Series A round led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures that also included a group of Boulder-based angel investors, including David Cohen, the executive director of TechStars. The startup launched at the TechStars demo day last winter.

Salesforce.com’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, Force.com ,has rolled out a new capability, called Force.com Sites, that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform.

Salesforce says that advantage of Force.com Sites is that companies can quickly deploy, scale and run applications and sites in real-time without having to deal with software or hardware hassles. The new feature lets companies build a database with established privacy settings, create public sites with a variety of programming languages, including HTML, JavaScript Flex and CSS, access analytics, register domains and more.

Salesforce has been testing this in a pilot program for 85 companies, including the American Red Cross, Crocs, Dell, and Starbucks. Sites were built for these enterprises for e-commerce, recruitment, distribution and inventory management, ticketing and scheduling, Facebook apps and social networking. For example, Starbucks recently launched a volunteer site to engage customers in finding volunteer work off of Force.com Sites. The site, which was only built in 4 weeks, has a database of volunteer opportunities around the country.

Salesforce is also announcing a free edition of Force.com, giving small businesses and entrepreneurs a budget friendly way to use Salesforce’s platform. The company originally announced the Force.com Sites capability last winter, signaling Salesforce’s ambitions to expand Force.com’s cloud into hybrid applications that span both internal enterprise customers and the customers of those applications. Not only is the Sites feature a new business channel, but it’s a way to further Salesforce’s presence in the enterprise (which is already significant). And it’s a way to remain competitive in the fast-growing cloud computing space.

I’m trying to remember what it was like before software went away. Seems like a long time ago, and yet very immediate. It’s like the Steinberg New Yorker cover: the West Side Drive, the Hudson, New Jersey, the Rockies, Big Sur. One day we thought in the context of applications, the next in downloads, and now in updates. There is no single application, just iterative features flowing in realtime across social networks.

It of course is all software, just like Office and Notes and links and RSS aren’t really dead. But to some of us, the deltas between the updates are what we notice, not the interfaces or the algorithms or the constructs we think of as spreadsheet or maps or OS. Instead, we admire the evolution of the fabric, the back and forth of competitors catching up and falling behind each other. It’s a different model from the heyday of new this, new that, Best Of, and Top Tens.

What are the ten best things we can do today with our computers? Try as I might, it keeps collapsing into one thing: Discover. IM, yeah that’s cool; I can reach out to someone across time zone and distance with a click or two. Effortless and utilitarian, grab a second of attention or share a gossip or two. Less social pressure than an email (if you want to get a letter, send one) and an adequate replacement for the phone. Voice becomes something you save things for, enough items to make the exchange time-worthy.

One to many is the next phase, the ping-pong Twitter gambits, the FriendFeed Rolling Thunder revues, the video swarms that combine the immediacy with the excitement of the frontier. Volatile as hell, you betcha. The constant drumbeat of explanation only ephemerally covering the nervous stabs at finding some comfort level without destroying the vibrancy. Serious business indeed, whatever the disclaimers.

Funny how we push back against the subtle, when all we crave is the deltas, not the big shifts. We are terrified of the rollercoaster of innovation, but too little of the hint of it drives us into depression and anger. It’s a balance we can only monitor by indirection, through the absence of indications to the contrary. The only thing we’re sure of is what it isn’t.

I don’t miss the software like I thought I would. Truth be told, I like the space opened up by ignoring the different takes on the same idea, the sleight of hand designed to reach critical mass before it’s noticed, the politics of religion and the religion of not invented here. Even the standards guys are humbled by the easy rolling swell of the waves of iteration. The intersection of multicore, broadband, and XML has produced a platform so broad and malleable that the lawyers are unable to keep up or track of where the value is moving.

In one of the interviews for his new record (?) Bob Dylan talks about how he and his band use mathematics to drive what they are doing. The discussion references the changing rhythm patterns of the constantly reworked songs of the Bard’s canon. But his answer is not precisely mysterious but confident in its transparency. And yet, somehow, he preserves the room to create without the meth-fueled exhilaration of the hunt with which he brought his early work forward. I come nowhere near his clarity but that doesn’t mean I’m not onto something.

Discovering is something worth nurturing, whether it’s by searching or listening or running silent and deep. My top ten is really 30 or so, constantly shifting and lapping and taking fiery pit stops, but always in balance in their aggregate instantiation of the stream. As new tools develop to honor this turbulence, we will briefly see them as software, then watch them blend into the delta flow.

With the Gillmor Gang shut down, I’ve been shifting my attention to the Realtime Stream CrunchUp Eric Schonfeld and I are hosting July 10 at the Fox Theater in Redwood City. Growing interest from startups, bigcos, open standards developers, and investors augurs for a valuable event. I hope you’ll join us.

Some of the areas we expect to see explored include, obviously, Twitter, its ecosystem of third party developers and products, and the reactions of and interactions with other social media platforms. Facebook’s namespace rollout of the past few days is just one of the ripple effects of Twitter’s surge. Others include FriendFeed’s realtime services, live video streaming and low cost digital production, Google’s Wave project, smartphone platform strategies, Robert Scoble’s Building 43 community, and the battle for control of the center of the Web OS desktop.

Stringing these technologies and brands together highlights both how early and how late we are in this cycle of renewed innovation. Just a few short months ago, we were debating if Twitter would survive, whether Facebook would open up, why Google and Microsoft would see realtime as anything more than a distraction, and the eternal where’s the money. Today, the answers to those questions are clear: Yes, As quickly as possible, Because they have no other real competition than each other, and Right where it’s always been — the enterprise.

With Oracle swallowing Sun, the enterprise dynamics have swung hard to right, past cloud computing, and directly into the mobile identity landrush. It’s easy to pigeonhole smart phones as the latest version of Studio 54 society politics, but in fact our identities are being consolidated around the SIM chip, with our social graph around the Follow/Track architecture of Twitter and its subsidiaries. Today the switching costs from device to device are substantial, but Apple’s aggressive deployment of the iPhone and AppStore application divide are doing to the carriers what widgets did to Yahoo.

The razor blades are winning, gaining ground, and inexorably blacktopping the differences between service plans, mobile browsing, location-based services, and social graph (affinity) marketing. It’s a language the carriers understand: revenue per user divided by cost of customer acquisition. Feature comparisons between devices are not the defining metric for where the market will flow. Neither are broadband buildout, developer lock-in, or any other measure of value — except realtime elasticity.

If you look at realtime access as the most valuable asset we control, our phone number is at the top of the priority list. Starting from the bottom, Facebook lets us be pinged by semi-strangers without surrendering email address, symmetrical follow provides direct messaging assent on Twitter, IM and SMS we use to determine permission for realtime voice access. The interrupt moves from soft to hard, from intermittent to constant. The more complete, the more valuable. People guard their privacy. Smartphones allow the full panoply of options at all times. Now we guard our protocols like we used to guard our devices.

Abstractions such as Mesh and Gmail/Gchat/Gvideo are the new platforms, the new Office/OS hybrid. Realtime takes away the distinction between operating system and application services. To the iPhone customer, the device is simply an enabler of the new OS services that stream down to whatever client the user can afford; the most advanced services unlocked by the latest device are the upsell not so much for the device as the tariff negotiated with the carriers.

Put another way, I’m not paying 5 or 6 hundred bucks for video recording, I’m paying it for the (eventual) streaming video conferencing provided via the AppStore. I’m investing in pointing my phone at the Hot Chili Kit shelf at the Safeway and saying, “This one?” And soon I’m betting the Hot Chili Kit is going to look at my phone and say, “How about 10% off, Steve?” and “Oh, by the way, Steve, don’t forget the buns and you’re out of bacon, right TIna?” And the more Steve and Tina’s there are the faster these services arrive, which keeps us engaged and subsidized enough to keep the flow going.

At a macro level, the smart phone is setting up a widget platform across the Safeways and Targets and WalMarts that will be highly disruptive of their customer lock. They will not let this go lightly, just as the carriers are bending to Apple’s will one by one and then service by service and probably never device by device. The Pre and the G2 don’t have to match Apple to play in this game, but only Apple can run the table on the carriers. Whoever controls the ground game is likely to win. The ground game is user behavior. By moving the ball in realtime, in video, in a good enough latency to allow an adequate simulation of face to face interaction between charging stations, will take a bite about travel, entertainment, social gestures, political control. The Blackberry won the election.

In Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan talks about reading Kerouac:

Kerouac moves so fast with his words. No ambiguity. It was very emblematic of the time. You grabbed a hold of the train, hopped on and went along with him, hanging on for dear life. I think that’s what affected me more than whatever he was writing about.

Buried in the Realtime dialogue will be that notion of the hell-bent-for-leather nature of the social stream, that this is no way to spend our lives like rats pushing buttons for more pellets. Certainly I stop from time to time and wonder about my seemingly endless fascination with these machines and pulses of alleged information. It often seems so ephemeral, with a saccharine aftertaste and the bloated feeling of too many potato chips. But that’s not the sum of it, or even the meat of it. More and more I seek refuge from the stream, even as I crave its rushing waters. As Dylan sings:

Admitting life is hard, without you near me

Google is continuing its push to gain on Microsoft in the enterprise space. On Google’s Enterprise Blog, there’s a profile of application software company, Serena, which migrated from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps recently. The story of course is that the company saved a lot of time, resources and money in switching over to Google Apps.

We thought about replacing our on-premise solution, but to tell the truth, we were skeptical. I, personally, had been a Microsoft admin for 15 years, and Microsoft technologies were ingrained in my thought processes. But Google Apps provided many pluses: Gmail, Google’s Postini messaging security software and 25 GB of mailbox space, as well as greater uptime and 24/7 phone support.

Apps also offered reliable mobile access and included other Google productivity and collaboration applications, such as Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations – all at $50 per user per year. The cost savings would amount to a whopping $750,000 per year. All this added up to the ability to save the company money and to transition to a more advanced, flexible infrastructure.

Google Apps, a suite of productivity services first launched in 2006, and has evolved from there. Today more than 1 million businesses use Google apps and “hundreds of millions of dollars” is generated in revenue.

But Google knows that in the enterprise, Outlook is still king and not everyone is ready to switch just yet to browser-based email, calendars and contact management. Which is why Google recently announced a new plug-in, called Google App Sync, that will sync Google’s enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar with Microsoft’s Outlook, allowing employees to use Outlook if that is what they are comfortable with. Google Apps will run the system on the backend. The new syncing tool currently works only on Windows and is available for (paying) enterprise customers.

Using case examples like Serena Software, Google is trying to show the cost benefits of Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange and Google is claiming that its enterprise apps cost less than half of Microsoft Exchange. Google says Google Apps costs companies $8.47 per user per month while Microsoft Exchange online is $20.32. Though there has been some question as to whether Google has a viable enterprise strategy, it appears that the tech giant has made some compelling strategic moves. But, Google still has a long road to evangelize the plethora of Microsoft Exchange users in the enterprise space. It will no doubt be fascinating to see how they encounter this challenge.

Yahoo! is releasing their tested source code used to help power its sites and products, called Hadoop. Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Yahoo made the announcement at the second annual Hadoop Summit today in Santa Clara, California, which was co-sponsored by other cloud computing vendors Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.

Yahoo! has been the primary developer and investor to Apache’s Hadoop. In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo to lead the project of developing the open-source software. Hadoop now provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services. Hadoop runs on more than 25,000 servers and analyzes billions of Web pages.

Yahoo says its opening up the source code to Hadoop to “increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.” Hadoop is currently being used by a number of cloud computing vendors, including Amazon Web Services (to power its Elastic MapReduce feature,) IBM (for its Blue Cloud Initiative) and Google. Startup Cloudera offers its own Hadoop-powered computational services on top of Amazon’s EC2.

Yahoo hasn’t been doing much in the cloud computing space but releasing this code could further its commitment to making a name in the cloud. It has a ways to go to catch up to Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and others but this release may engage developers in Hadoop.