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Ok so Google services rawk, the problem is their are so many of them and it’s a bit…. spread all over. Google Dashboard is a new service that shows a summary of the data stored with a Google account. You’ll soon find a link to Google Dashboard in the “personal settings” of the “my account” page. This is handy if you use a bunch of Google services like GMail, maps, docs, etc.

The dashboard lists some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox, your Google profile, the most recent entries from the web history etc. It’s a long answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”.

Rumors spread yesterday about how Google was going to make a “Chrome Operating System”. Of course there have been rumors of a Google OS for years now. In early 2006, Ars reported on Google’s denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google’s full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android. It turns out that’s not the case… it’s NOT going to be Android (though Google won’t preclude third-party adopters from using Android).

Last night at 9:00pm Google’s official blog raised the flag indicating Google was getting into the OS race. So what is the OS? It’s being Google Chrome OS and the operating system will center on Google Chrome and be targeted for netbooks (initially). It will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. While speculation was wild a few days ago about a Chrome OS, what wasn’t understood was how Chrome, a browser, could BE an OS…. a browser isn’t actually an operating system, what about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. It turns out Google is cranking out a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – welp, that solves issues about drivers and such.

So what’s the intention here? Google intends that the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using existing web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform. If you do a lot in the cloud now then as TechCrunch put it “Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.”

The timing of this couldn’t be any more bitter sweet for Microsoft. Windows 7 RTM lands next week with the full release for October. I have to wonder if Google was trying to take a bit of wind out of Microsoft’s sails since on of the things touted was how well Windows 7 runs on netbooks. The Google Chrome OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010 – not that far behind the release of Windows 7.

Does this spell the end of Microsoft Windows? I’d say don’t count them out yet. Chrome OS will be new and will essentially require cloud computing. Sure, for most things I could get by on that, and as the web gets faster, HTML 5 hits, etc we will be able to do more and more in the cloud. In addition to the Microsoft has been developing “Gazelle” as an alternative to Internet Explorer. The browser acts like a self-contained operating system (sounds like Chrome OS) and is designed to address the fact that browsers like IE and Chrome have not been built by design to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner. The browser relies on a “browser kernel” (5,000 lines of C# code) that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC’s underlying operating system. Built by the Microsoft Research team, company officials have been dropping hints that they are ready to talk more about Gazelle recently – perhaps as the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Google’s official blog post on Google Chrome OS

The Internet was abuzz with reports of widespread trouble with Google Inc.’s Google Apps service this morning.

Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, while an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader. Comments about the failure were flying on Twitter, and “googlefail” quickly became one of the most-searched terms on the popular microblogging site.

So what happened? This morning Google finally posted their response:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

Google isn’t known for using advertising to gain market share. But it looks like that wont be the case for their shiny new browser: Google Chrome.

Chrome ads have been showing up all over the Web on Google-owned sites like YouTube as well as third-party websites like LinkedIn. Now, the company is set to launch TV ads to promote the Web browser and they’ll be starting as early as this weekend.

The commercial itself was developed by Google Japan and is…. abstract. There is no voice over and no people. The video has the simple message “Install Google Chrome” at the end. It’s all very Apple-ish.  I almost expect the “there’s an app for that” voice to show up at the end.

What is now clear is that Google is committed to growing Chrome’s marketshare moreso than any other product in recent memory. This is to be expected, now that they’ve officially entered the browser game each Chrome install equals another user that gets Google as their default search engine. That said, Chrome is still lacking two key things: a Mac version (for those who run Mac’s) and an extension platform. Rumor has it that some announcements relating to those items may come at Google’s developer conference later this month…. until then I’ll hold onto FireFox.

With Gmail you can consolidate multiple email addresses so that you can use Gmail as a universal inbox. It’s awesome, I do it, and now from one interface can get to nearly every email account I have. One annoying “feature” was that if you were sending from an account that was the one you were currently logged into it would send the email with a statement saying “on behalf of”. So it would look something like: “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.”  Well, some good news…Google has dropped this annoying feature. Now you can much more legitimately use Gmail as your multiple email control center without broadcasting that fact to the world. And let’s face it… you WANT to use Gmail as your control center.