GoogleGears is going; HTML5 is in?This week Google announced that it's going to stop developing Gears integration into their online application suite:We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.Gears is that cool technology that lets you take your work with you and use Google's online apps in an offline environment -- then sync. the changes when you connect online again.Google wants to speed up the webGot a slower website? Then you may not be ranked as high in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as you used to be. Google is going to be considering page load speed as a factor, and have launched a few tools to help you identify speed problems with your website:This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shownincreased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues. Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future. Google wants to know morePublic DNS, one of those arcane internet technologies that is absolutely essential, can now be obtained by Google. Future Shop TechbloggerTris Hussey wrote about it earlier this week and a great discussion developed in the comments: Is this a good thing? That is a bigger, and stickier, question. If you control the DNS, you control where people go when they want to visit websites. There is implicit trust that DNS servers are genuine, which is why when they are compromised by hackers it's a huge deal. So Google or OpenDNS could poison the DNS records to redirect people to a site different than what the site owners intend and you'd never know it. Would they? Probably not. AppleWould-be Apple tablet competition's over before it beginsThe CrunchPad - a super-thin tablet for light computing and web surfing - had huge promise, but it appears to have self-destructed on the launch pad, so to speak:It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
Shockingly inexpensive -- the Apple Tablet?
Latest rumor on the Apple Tablet comes from the latest episode of Diggnation - and it looks like the price point will be highly competitive:
After pestering from Rose, Albrecht eventually conceded: "I was shocked at how cheap the price point is going to be." He declined to reveal anything further.


Microsoft
Those black screens of death? They're not security patch related.
"The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports," Christopher Budd, Microsoft's security response communications lead, said in a statement sent to seattlepi.com . "While we were not contacted by the organization who originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings."


Bing!
Microsoft's search engine had a rough week, and was missing in action while it recovered:
Bing.com was down between about 6:30 and 7:00 PM Pacific Time on Dec 3, 2009. During this time, users were either unable to get to the site, or their queries were returning incomplete results page.

The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.



Interesting Net Tech, Apps & Software
No such thing as a Bandwidth Hog?
Interesting read - a project that appears to debunk the theory proported by Internet Service Providers that Bandwidth Hogs ruin the internet experience ...
ISPs "claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behavior harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users," he writes. "And to add insult to injury, they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5 percent and call them hogs."





Your Turn
So, did I miss anything? What online story really got you going this week? Link to it in the comments!