"The Twitter message limit of 140 characters was based on the limit of 160 characters imposed by SMS in general—we just needed some room to include your name in front of the message," he says. "It’s this simple constraint that allows Twitter to work well in so many places."

Stone says that while the company is thrilled to provide two-way SMS communication to more people, they’re busy working on the rest of the world. Good news for those missing out on this big feature.

When you can easily Tweet from anywhere via SMS, there is bound to be a whole lot more tweeting going on. Let’s just hope Twitter can handle the load.

Those who wish to activate Twitter with their mobile network need to go to their settings page. Enter your number with a "+" and your country code (leaving off the leading 0 of your number if applicable). There is also a checkbox that you have to check, which says that it’s ok for Twitter to send text messages to your phone.

WildBlue is a satellite ISP, and it recently sealed a deal to put Google’s products in front of its customers.  Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Page Creator, and Google Gadgets are all involved, so this is more than some sort of superficial, email-related exchange.

"We think WildBlue’s customers will enjoy discovering these new and exciting opportunities to find, share and interact on the web," said Stephen Cho, the product management director of Google Syndication Products, in a statement.

Now, normally, we might cut out that bit of PR-speak.  But it seems unusually relevant at the moment, given a debate over Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet.  Garett Rogers writes, "The right place for Google is at the consumer level – until it can take greater steps to cover the majority of needs enterprise users have, they should focus on doing exactly what they did with WildBlue."

We still won’t look for Google to topple Microsoft, then (at least not in the near future), but as it makes improvements (and Microsoft makes mistakes), market shares may move.

Google Frowns On Rogers Injection

The example of Rogers dropping a notice onto Google’s homepage began making the rounds yesterday. Some people called it a threat to net neutrality, which seems a little too extreme an assessment.

Matt Cutts called the practice “pretty uncool,” but noted this was not the official Google party line.

“It may be your only chance to see the word “Yahoo!” on Google

Well, Yahoo’s not an official sponsor, but the message was co-branded with a Rogers Internet message warning customers nearing their monthly bandwidth limit.

Los Angeles-based technology consultant and Network Neutrality advocate Lauren Weinstein was clued in by "a concerned reader" that Rogers was testing its Internet Subscriber Notification Service that uses java script code developed by in-browser marketing firm PerfTech to deliver the Rogers Yahoo Hi-Speed Internet messages.

Weinstein writes, "While Rogers’ current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system…is for account status messages, it’s obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism."

Rogers justified the program by saying it was just a way for customers to keep track of their usage, and noted that there was no interference with the search. They also denied there was any "deep package" inspection going on, or that there were any privacy issues.

But critics say it’s very basic premise – modifying a webpage at the network level – that is disturbing. TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick relates how inserting corporate messages violates an unwritten contract where customers expect their ISPs to remain unobtrusive "dumb pipes."

"[ISPs] feel that they are more important than the content and services you are using. This is what leads to all those network neutrality debates, where the ISPs forget that they’re providing just a pipe and think that they are the most important part of the process and have the right to change how everything else works. "

Masnick doesn’t believe this is justification for Network Neutrality legislation, but Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired expects it "become Exhibit A" among proponents.

Canadian blogger Steven Hodson’s complaints mirror the complaints made in the United States about the current state of the ISP market, which involves lack of competition, too much telco influence in government, and no government oversight:

"The things is that while it is the Americans that seem most worried about this intrusion by the ISP just about every Canadian knows that chances are nothing at all is going to be done to protect the consumer from this type of thing continuing just as nothing will be done about the rampant traffic shaping that is going on."  

Google hasn’t yet responded to request for comment regarding Rogers’ modification of its homepage, but Google’s webspam head Matt Cutts called the event "uncool." Chances are good Google won’t like it, and Cutts calls it the "only chance to see the word ‘Yahoo!’ on Google’s home page in three different places."  

Everyone loves the visual appeal of charts. It’s hard to imagine Microsoft’s PowerPoint or the latest issue of USA Today without a chart or two. They get attention, and when crafted properly convey information rapidly to the viewer.

Google thinks web publishers should be able to do this easily for their visitors. At the Google Code blog, Steve Crossan announced the debut of the Google Chart API.

"No state, no calls, just send your data in an http request and get a png image graph back. Embed the request in an img tag and you’re done. We currently support line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and sparklines," said Crossnan.

The API stemmed from Google’s internal development of it to use in their other services, like Finance and Video. Crossnan said the project started as one of those fabled 20-percent-time projects in Google’s Zurich operations.

Garett Rogers at Googling Google applauded the Chart API, but questioned its long-term value to Google.

"It’s hard to imagine what the business model for this one is. Google’s basically just offering up free CPU power and bandwidth for charts without any chance of recovering their costs," he wrote.

The prudent site publisher will likely do a chart call and simply store the resulting image locally, which would remove the ongoing demand for Google to keep regenerating it on request.

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The Lights Out San Francisco organization had asked people “to turn off all non-essential lighting for one hour” and install a compact fluorescent light bulb; at the same time, Google put up a black homepage that was visible only to users in the area.  Garett Rogers has a screenshot, however, and also links to a page showing that the two groups may have had quite an effect.

Granted, a before and after shot of the Transamerica Pyramid looks pretty much the same.  But Coit Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco City Hall became considerably darker.  Also, turning off the lights at the Palace of Fine Arts actually seems to have enhanced its appearance.

It seems slightly odd, though, for Google to have supported Lights Out San Francisco.  Granted, the company’s done plenty for the environment – from celebrating International Cleanup Weekend to putting $10 million towards sustainable transport, its efforts never end – but Google.com rarely changes.  Also, something city-specific is a little out of character.

Still, Google called this “a timely, important event,” and once we remember that the company just opened an office in San Francisco, the move seems more natural.

Google has a weakness when it comes to keeping new products a secret. According to Garett Rogers, Google uses volunteers to do much of its foreign translation–they provide them when a sentence or two and the volunteers provide the translation. While Google gets all of their translation needs fullfilled for less than minimum-wage, it can make it hard to keep new products a secret.

Rogers first provided us with a screenshot that suggests a new interface for Gmail might be forthcoming.

Next, Rogers did some additional digging and found more translation screenshots that suggest one of Gmail’s new features will be the much-desired “offline” capability.

Note: Google Gears is the tool that currently allows you to view your RSS Feeds offline.

Other new features include account use logging–so you can confirm who used your account and when.

As a Google Apps user, I’m glad to see Google might soon offer an offline version of Gmail. It’s interesting to note that this comes just days after Yahoo announced their acquisition of Zimbra and Mozilla revealed their plans for Thunderbird. It seems Google becomes highly motivated whenever there’s news from a competitor’s product.

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Doctor Google: Healthcare Through Search

Instead of "physician, heal thyself," the 21st century reworking of that ancient saying could be "you, heal yourself." Bits and pieces of Google Health, Google’s views on health ads notwithstanding, hint at a sum where people take an active role in their preventative care.

‘Googling Google’ blogger Garett Rogers dug into some healthcare blog observations to find a trail of clues that lead all the way to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his new wife, Anne Wojcicki:

23andme is a startup founded by Sergey Brin’s wife and funded by Sergey himself. The stage is set to give users access and real control of their own personal health. Just imagine one day being able to diagnose yourself with heart disease and take preventative measures years before a potential heart attack — scientifically determined through the human genome. Google would have to be very careful allowing users to diagnose themselves, but if its done right it could have a huge impact on society and quality of life.

The pieces that add up to this possible future come from e-CareManagement and The Health Care Blog. At e-CareManagement, Vince Kuraitis wrote at length about the various clues left out there by Adam Bosworth, head of Google Health, and others:

Google Health (GH) could be the event of the decade in advancing health care reform — not just healthcare information technology (HIT) reform, but health care system reform. GH promises simultaneously to create AND dominate the market for next generation personal health records (PHRs).

The Health Care Blog added on the suggestion about 23andMe’s involvement. That is the company Brin’s wife co-founded with financial backing from her husband. 23andMe "is a privately held company developing new ways to help you make sense of your own genetic information," the site says.

It’s been suggested that in the US, the healthcare industry excels at trauma care, but doesn’t perform nearly as well in preventative care. That’s what a hypothesized Google Health could correct.

Security of the information would have to be as critical as its accuracy. Letting prospective employers and others browse through its database like a Hippocratic version of Facebook, whether by accident or design, simply cannot happen.

According to a Business Week article covering Google’s new Custom Search Business Edition:

[Google] is preparing a corporate version of YouTube to create videos for training and employee communications.

Garett Rogers explores the ways that could be used at ZDNet, which includes further propagandizing (I mean, "reinforcing") internal corporate culture, and as a public relations channel.

But also, a corporate version of YouTube would allow businesses to control their messages better. The message is clear, their own, and hosted on their own channel. That means: no unruly, unwashed masses to mess

Can we look forward to “Colorful background skins”?  Almost certainly.  Yet as Garett Rogers notes, there’s also an option to “Have Gmail do my laundry,” and that seems less likely to become a reality.  Users get to vote for their five favorite possibilities, however, so there’s the chance that our opinions could bring some of the improbable choices into contention, or at least affect the order in which things are developed.

Enough checkmarks in the box to “Export messages to a CD for storage” could, for example, make Google address reliability issues.  Techdirt’s Mike Masnick even titled a recent article “Maybe You Should Back Up Your Own Email; Google, AOL, Yahoo All Losing Emails” – it seems like CD storage could solve the problem (although it would, of course, be easier if these losses didn’t occur in the first place).

Then there are the complaints of PC Magazine’s Davis D. Janowski, who writes that Gmail “lacks AJAX features, isn’t easy to use, and doesn’t have a sensible sorting ability.”  Some of the thirteen “Organization”-related boxes the Gmail poll provides should help with that.

And for problems that aren’t specifically addressed by the provided options, you can always look to the “I have a better idea” section and write in your own response.  Personally, I’m going with something related to dirty dishes – I’d rather have Gmail take care of those than my laundry.