E-mail was once the pillar of the Internet as a truly distributed, standards-based and non-centralized means to communication with people across the planet. Today, an increasing number of services people rely on are losing federation and interoperability by companies who need to keep people engaged on their for-profit services. Much of the Internet’s communication is moving to these walled gardens, leaving those who want to run their own services in an increasingly hostile communication landscape.

The fact that Google advertises their servers as supporting CardDAV is an insult to anyone who does try to be standards compliant.

The Google CardDAV server has similarities to what we call CardDAV. For very simple, controlled stuff, it may be possible to pretend it is.

For anything advanced, avoid it at all cost.

This article outlines the scale of that codebase and details Google's custom-built monolithic source repository and the reasons the model was chosen. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google's developer workflows. Here, we provide background on the systems and workflows that make feasible managing and working productively with such a large repository. We explain Google's "trunk-based development" strategy and the support systems that structure workflow and keep Google's codebase healthy, including software for static analysis, code cleanup, and streamlined code review.

Ashish Kumar presents how Google manages to keep the source code of all its projects, over 2000, in a single code trunk containing hundreds of millions of code lines, with more than 5,000 developers accessing the same repository.

Gmail represents a dying class of products that, like Google Reader, puts control in the hands of users, not signal-harvesting algorithms.

My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go. I say "almost" because one component of the system -- a library for transcoding between image formats -- works perfectly well in C++, so we decided to leave it as-is. But the rest of the system is 100% Go, not just wrappers to existing modules in C++ or another language. It's been a fun experience and I thought I'd share some lessons learned.

When the copyright industry is demanding that Google censors “search results” from their investigative reports, they are demanding that an investigative news agency alter their journalistic findings because those findings of fact happen to be starkly embarrassing to the copyright industry. Further, the copyright industry is also demanding that the news agency should lie to the public about what the world actually looks like.

Google not only reserves the right to take away or vaporize our data for any reason, but it also reserves the right to discontinue services, the means to access it, whenever it wants. It does this more often than you probably realize and most recently with Google Reader, which disappears on July 1.

The first underwater panoramic images were added to Google Maps with the help of Catlin Seaview Survey scientific expedition, which hoped that the up-close view of underwater wonders would inspire people to protect them.

Last week, Google announced a new, simplified privacy policy. They did a great job of informing users that the privacy policy had been changed through emails and notifications, and several experts (including Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian) have praised the shift toward a simpler, more unified policy. Unfortunately, while the policy might be easier to understand, Google did a less impressive job of publicly explaining what in the policy had actually been changed.

In fact, it took a letter from eight Representatives to persuade them to provide straightforward answers to the public about their new policy.

Here’s what you need to know about the substantive changes in the new policy: