I never really found much use for Wave  and now it’s leaving…

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

By Cade Metz in San Francisco

Google’s worldwide data center network spans about 900,000 servers, according to an estimate based on new information the company has deigned to share about its power use.

Previous estimates put Google’s server count at over one million.

In a new report from Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey on data center energy usage, Google estimates that it accounts for less than one per cent of the energy consumed across the world’s data centers, and Koomey uses this figure to extrapolate Google’s worldwide server count. The web giant does not divulge the number of servers used in its network of roughly 40 data centers, which stretches from California to Finland to Asia.

According to Koomey, Google’s servers account for about 2.8 per cent of the volume servers installed in data centers across the globe.

As reported by Data Center Knowledge, the Stanford prof puts the world’s 2010 data center energy usage at 198.8 billion kWh, which would mean Google’s facilities consume about 220 megawatts of power. “While Google is a high profile user of computer servers, less than 1% of electricity used by data centers worldwide was attributable to that company’s data center operations,” Koomey writes.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that Google has revealed specific details about their total data center electricity use (they gave me an upper bound, not an exact number, but something is better than nothing!).”

Thus, Koomey says, Google’s custom built data centers are considerably more efficient than run-of-the mill corporate data centers, though he indicates that Google’s infrastructure is comparable to other “cloud computing” installations. The company is now operating chillerless data centers in Belgium and Finland, with the latter facility cooled solely with water from the Baltic Sea, and it has designed its own servers with built-in batteries that remove the need for a separate UPS (uninterruptible power supply).

Speaking with The Reg, a Google software engineer who recently left the company also indicated that Google’s data center technologies have moved well beyond what has been reported in the press, but he declined to provide specifics, citing a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Though Google’s servers now number about 900,000, the company has plans to expand to as many as 10 million, according to a public presentation describing a new software platform dubbed Spanner, which automatically moves and replicates loads between its data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. According to that same Google ex-engineer, the company was just beginning to roll out Spanner when he left the company this summer. ®

Source

Google says that on April 29, Google Videos will no longer be viewable on the site, and the download function will still be available for a couple of weeks to allow users to retrieve their work. Perhaps many of those users will move their video clips to Google’s other video service, YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006.

Read More from the source….

They don’t have that button yet, but we all know that is the next logical step to make this addition to Google’s venture into social a more viable. Okay, here is the video followed by Google’s take on what they are offering up:

Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it. Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want them, in your search results.

The next time you’re trying to remember that bed and breakfast your buddy was raving about, or find a great charity to support, a +1 could help you out. Just make sure you’re signed in to your Google Account.

Show +1′s

In order to +1 things, you first need a public Google profile. This helps people see who recommended that tasty recipe or great campsite. When you create a profile, it’s visible to anyone and connections with your email address can easily find it.

Your +1’s are stored in a new tab on your Google profile. You can show your +1’s tab to the world, or keep it private and just use it to personally manage the ever-expanding record of things you love around the web.

and now I see its only a April Fools Joke!

They had me going…oooooooh.feel burned!

Groupon did NOT sell. Even if it was 6 BILLION dollars.

Google said, oh well so much for the easy way to get into this market space.

The Hard way, sort of, is to build and market their own deals website/network.

Enter Google OFFERS….surely to be tied into their maps and places.

Here come the competition Groupon and Living Social.

Read up on what is coming to an internet connection near you.

CLICK HERE

Google sets crawl budget based primarily on your site’s authority. That means PageRank of individual pages. Sites with a higher average PR across their pages will see a larger crawl budget; Google will crawl more URLs on these sites.

<–Nerd alert!–>

Read the full article HERE

My brief synapses

The basic thing to remember is that the higher your page rank is the longer googlebot will stay in your site and crawl and index your pages.
There are a few other nice nuggets of search info in this article too.

This means that developers increasingly are going to need to choose the platform they should develop for first, and the answer seems increasingly to be Google’s open web.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

My Brief Comment:
I am happy that Android is Open Source. Apple has held the mobile phone “coolness” for too long, keeping their code locked up.
I am a Droid owner and happy to hear that Apple and it properiety ways are starting to see the bright lights coming down.