Update: Google has addressed the issue on the Official Blog. The company says:

A security researcher known by the online handle of “Inferno” discovered a cross-site scripting ( XSS) vulnerability in mid-April affecting a range of Google services like Gmail, Google Documents, iGoogle, and Analytics.

Yahoo said today it is expanding its cloud computing research efforts and has partnered with three more U.S. universities.

The University of California at Berkley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research.

Amazon Web Services has introduced the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a cloud computing service that allows businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to process large amounts of data.

Google Docs has started including a new feature – the ability to insert drawings into documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. To use this feature, simply go to the Insert menu and click Drawing.

Salesforce.com has added Twitter support to its Service Cloud offering, which was released earlier in the year. Salesforce breaks down what companies can expect to get out of the service:

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing service, has announced it has added a new pricing option for Amazon EC2 called Reserved Instances.

Reserved Instances extends the current on-demand pay-as-you-go pricing by giving customers an option to make a one-time payment to reserve capacity and reduce hourly charges.

After the one- time payment, the instance is reserved enabling customers to only pay for the compute capacity they use, and if they don’t use an instance they will not pay usage charges on it. Reserved Instances are available in 1-year or 3-year terms.

Google Video for Business has got a couple of new features. They are captions and larger uploads.

Captions can obviously open up communication on a whole new level with subtitles alone. This makes videos more accessible to those who cannot hear well and those who speak other languages. As far as uploading, users with Google Gears can upload videos of up to 1 GB. Before it was only 300 MB.

On Friday Google contacted some Google Docs users to alert them of a privacy issue. Less than 0.05% of user docs were accidentally shared with people with whom they were not supposed to be. 

As you’ve probably read by now (if not experienced firsthand), there was an outage for Gmail the other night. This ended up impacting a lot of businesses, and was not exactly the greatest demonstration of Google’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. I guess there’s always that other 0.1%.

President Obama’s nomination for Antitrust Chief, Christine A. Varney, has a history of criticizing Google on the topic of antitrust. Current concern appears to be focused on Google’s efforts in the cloud computing world.

We’ve been hearing a lot these days about cloud computing and data portability. It only makes sense that we see some data portability through the cloud as well right?

Confused yet? Think services like Facebook Connect combined with Google Apps.

Google has started a program in which resellers can begin selling Google Apps to businesses. Naturally, you would sell the apps to customers, and then kick up money to Google.

Today Apple announced the newest version of its office productivity suite iWork, which includes:

– Pages ’09
– Numbers’09, and
– Keynote ’09

Microsoft has filed a patent for a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience." The exact words of the filing’s abstract are as follows:

Google Apps for Education has had a big year, further emphasizing Google’s push for cloud computing. A push that has included a recent guarantee of 99.9% uptime on certain Google Apps. Cloud computing with Google Apps has often been discussed in the business context, and it is clearly quite relevant to the education field as well.

Google has redone the Google Docs Help Forum. It has added a few features to improve the ease with which users can obtain info, and increase the overall user experience. New features include:

Tim Johnson of the Google Enterprise Team has posted a look into Google’s Web Security product today, including a video that talks about the differences between web filtering and web security. The video looks like a UPS commercial, and is easy to follow for the non-tech crowd.

The global strategic alliance between Google and Salesforce.com just got stronger.  The two companies have teamed up to offer a package called Force.com for Google App Engine, which is supposed to help developers create new applications in the cloud.

As mentioned previously, Google is spending a lot of time "in the clouds" so to sepak. They’ve been emphasizing cloud computing a lot lately, even going so far as to make a 99.9% guarantee with regarding to up-time for Google Apps.

Today Google is touting the reliability of Gmail, and comparing the service to several "on-premises" solutions in terms of downtime and lost productivity. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google Enterprise Product Director Matthew Glotzbach writes: