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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?”.

Google announced today a new, experimental idea aiming to reshape the future of communication on the web. It’s called Wave, and if you believe its Google, it’s “what email would look like if it were invented today.” Oh ya… and the whole thing is Open Source; the protocols will be available to anyone. Wave is about jazzing up real-time communication on the web.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

According to Google Wave will allow:

• Real-time collaboration – Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time
• Natural language tools – Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction
• Extensible – Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

If you have an hour and twenty minutes to burn you can watch the entire thing explained by the folks at Google.

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.”

The updates coming out of Google this week are fast and furious. Today marks the announcement of yet another labs feature. This one will enable multiple inbox panes in the Gmail interface. All you have to do is go into the Labs tab in your Gmail account to enable the new feature; you’ll then be able to enable Multiple inboxes tab in your Gmail interface. Once turned on you can pick up to five different panes. The panes can be set to display to the right of your inbox, above your inbox, or below it.

There are plenty of uses for this feature: If you pull mail in from multiple sources each can have it’s own inbox pane.  Alternatively, you could set it up to provide a quick view of important labels, starred, superstarred, or draft messages all in separate panels.

When setting up your multiple inboxes, you can use any of Gmail’s search operators to create any sort of search you want. For example,  inboxes might include searches like:

is:starred
is:unread
has:attachment

Again, this has been a big week of announcement for the Google camp. So far this week the following announcements have come out:

• First Official Description of GDrive – Google cloud storage drive
  
• Google Latitude – which lets you share geo-location via Google Mobile Maps
• Gmail added Folders – Adding a new move-to functionality to Gmail
• Google Offline Calendar – They then enabled Gears support to use Google Calendar in an offline mode

You can read more over at Lifehacker or as always hit up the Official Gmail blog.