Google has decided to extend and pick up the pace of its “Going Google” (Apps and enterprise products) traditional media campaign. The ads were first launched in August in four cities with billboards. Now Google says the campaign will be expanded globally to “the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore” and appear “in train stations such as Paddington, La Défense and Shinagawa, and at airports in Singapore, Toronto, Dallas and beyond . . .”

Here’s a promotional video (”campaign preview”):

The campaign seeks to establish the credibility of Google’s enterprise offerings by naming companies that have adopted them, that have “Gone Google.” And, yes, it’s about stealing customers from Microsoft’s more traditional software products. But that’s obvious.

What’s more interesting to me is that Google is now much less inhibited about doing traditional media advertising, which it has done for Maps, Transit, the LBC, Chrome, Book Search (court-ordered) and AdWords/AdSense. There’s also a ton of advertising going on for Android phones, of course, although that’s being paid for by Google’s partners: T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, HTC, Motorola and others. Every ad for Android is indirectly an ad for Google.

Now that Google acknowledges traditional media spending and promotion are often important to build awareness, we’re likely to see the company do more of this sort of thing in the future. In my mind, it marks a significant change in Google’s attitude toward media and advertising. It’s also consistent with the “maturation” of the company.

Google is launching a billboard campaign in four major cities named “Going Google.” There is a ton of buzz around the campaign, being that Google typically does not conduct traditional forms of advertising and that this is a direct shot at Microsoft.

First, here is a video of some of the billboards:

As you can see, this is promoting Google Apps in a major way. Not only does this drive to the core of Microsoft’s products, but it is also one of the few times Google using traditional means of advertising. It is funny to see Microsoft advertise Bing on TV and at the same time to see this from Google, in addition to them advertising AdSense on radio. But if one thing is clear, Google has been using traditional forms of advertising to promote Google Apps, Chrome, Google Maps, and even AdSense.

I will be driving by one of the billboard locations that this ad should appear on. I am not sure if the ad will be there today, but if it is, I will do my best to snap a picture and post it here.

For more information, see google.com/appsatwork.

What is it? Google’s answer to Twitter? Email and IM replacement? Personal communications and collaboration platform? These were questions and characterizations that emerged as Google announced Wave at the company’s May developer event in San Francisco. (Here’s a bit more context from my related post at the press conference.)

It’s a shapeshifter, a new species and something of a rorschach test for people because it crosses boundaries and isn’t easily defined.

Google Wave’s API has recently become available to developers. And now some first “hands on” impressions are out. Ben Rometsch wrote about his initial experience with Wave — “real-time email. On crack”:

Trying to describe it to my wife last night I came out with “It’s a cross between Messenger, Email and Facebook”. I still think that’s accurate, but it didn’t really help her! Once you start actually using it things slowly fall into place in your mind, but until you do so, it’s pretty hard to explain or understand.

I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s a bunch of shared IM conversations that are organised like email messages and stored on the server for time immemorial. The upshot of all this is that you can use it in a variety of different ways depending on what you want to achieve. It serves as an IM, IRC and Email server, but you can also do things that you might not necessarily first think of, such as using it as a simple Wiki with shared editing and history . . .

This is probably the most advanced ‘application in a browser’ that I’ve seen. It really does feel like a little operating system living in your browser tab. Using it suddenly makes Chrome and Chrome OS make a whole lot of sense. If you listen carefully you can hear Ballmer’s chairs flying around in the background.

I won’t make any grandiose predictions or snarky remarks. From what I’ve seen, however, at a distance it seems pretty interesting.

Watching Google and Microsoft lately has been like watching a tennis match: Each company seems to be taking turns hitting back at the other with new announcements, new products, and so forth. The latest volley isn’t strictly search-related, but it’s very notable: Microsoft announced “lightweight” versions of its Office products that will be free and web-based — a direct competitor to Google Apps.

The free products will include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, and will be available to anyone with a Microsoft Live account.

Just last week, Google got into the OS business when it announced the Google Chrome OS. Microsoft’s most recent volley before that, of course, was the introduction of Bing, its new search engine. And those are just the recent pieces of this back-and-forth game the two companies are playing.

Google Apps are popular today, no doubt in large part to beating Microsoft to the punch with free, online productivity apps. But Google’s advantage will disappear if the millions of people who use Microsoft Office on their computers begin to use the online versions and are satisfied with the experience.

The web versions of these four Office apps should be available in the first half of 2010. You can bet on Google returning this Microsoft volley before then.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

I was setting up a new domain last year, something I’d done countless times and could do with my eyes closed, when my hosting provider suddenly started pushing several Google products on me. Did I want to use Gmail for my domain? Did I want to use Google Apps for Domains? Well, no, but thanks. I think.

I found out later it was Google pushing those products via the “Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program,” which gives web hosting companies easy access to integrate Google products into their hosting services.

Google has announced this week that the program has been expanded to include AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search; it’s also been renamed to the much more speakable Google Services for Websites. The service makes it easy for web site owners to integrate a variety of Google services into their web sites with just a couple button clicks. And hosting companies can get paid when their customers sign up for AdSense or Google Site Search.

It’s great marketing and visibility for Google, and clearly a convenience for web site owners who want to use these services. But folks in the Google-is-already-too-ubiquitous crowd are probably non-plussed by the whole thing.

VentureBeat reports Google has launched a reseller program for Google Apps. The program is aimed at developers, hosting companies and others to take on the responsibility of billing, support and training, in exchange for a twenty-percent discount on the services. In short, Google will charge you 20% less of the standard fee and you can go to your client and charge them the price you see fit, for managing, billing, supporting and training them on Google Apps.

To be a reseller, you need to find customers to sell Google Apps to, then setup and deploy it for your customers and handle the billing side of things. Google will help train you on using Google Apps, so that you can provide the best level of support to your customers. In addition, Google is working on a certification program for Google Apps. For more news coverage on this story, see Techmeme.

To apply to become a reseller, complete this form.

Here is a short video on how this works:

Last night Google released Google Moderator, a tool to organize “tech talks” or question and answer sessions. It is a free service that Google used internally, but now made public. Matt Cutts said Google calls this application Dory “after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).”

To me, this seems like a more interactive version of Yahoo Suggestions, which is actually a closed tool to just Yahoo feedback. Matt Cutts said Google may be using this tool for future Webmaster Chat sessions. It will allow people to submit questions and then have those involved in the session vote up user submitted questions. Seems like a great organizational tool.

Here is a screen capture:

Maybe I can work on getting this used on a quarterly basis over here. If you are interested in that, do let us know.

NeeTeeVee reports Google is going to be adding video sharing tools to Google Apps for businesses this coming Monday. Paid users of Google Apps will be allowed to upload videos with no time restrictions but a maximum size per upload of 300 MB, for a total of 3GB per account and unlimited video views.

The tool is not going to give Google App users live video broadcasting or video conferencing capabilities, but users can tag, star and comment on videos. Video creators can also thumbnail important parts of the video, in order to highlight key points in the video. In addition, the videos can be embedded on other sites, used as a Google gadget and download an MPEG-4 version of the video.

Postscript: Google posted a press release with the official details on this new service:

Google Video for business is available now in English to Google Apps Premier Edition accounts at no additional cost. Each Google Apps Premier Edition domain gets 3GB of Video storage per user account. Existing Premier Edition administrators can enable Google Video for business immediately from the Google Apps control panel. A version for Google Apps Education Edition customers that allows faculty and staff to upload and share videos with students will be available on September 8 for free trial until March 9, 2009, at which point it will cost $10 per user, per year.

The Google News Blog announced that they have launched a special interface for the iPhone. To access it, all you need to do is go to Google.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch and navigate to the news section via the “more” link at the top right, or you can easily just go to http://news.google.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In addition, Google rolled out the iPhone interface globally to 33 new markets and 16 new languages. This includes a Google Apps launch for the iPhone, where all you need to do is go to http://www.google.com/m/a/YOURDOMAIN on your iPhone (replacing YOURDOMAIN with your domain) and you can access Google Apps on an iPhone interface.

Here is a picture of Google News on my iPhone:

Here is a picture of some fake documents I have in my Google Apps for my domain for testing purposes:

It appears that Google is having major issues with their email server. In the past 15 minutes, I received a few phones, tons of twits, and found a fast growing Google Groups thread about Google removing IMAP from their email settings options.

This seems to be a major issue, where hundreds of Gmail users can no longer use Gmail or their email on Google Apps. If you login to your Gmail account and click on “settings,” you may notice that the IMAP option is gone. Here is a screen capture:

Also, Rudd sent me a screen capture of errors he is receiving via Outlook when trying to connect to Google’s IMAP servers:

This issue still seems to be going on about 30 minutes later. I hope it gets fixed shortly. This issue is incredibly widespread and I personally notified several of my Google contacts.

Updating as I learn more…It seems like it is not just Gmail issues with IMAP, but also with Google Talk.

We’re back: At 4:30pm (EST), about 45 minutes later, IMAP support is now back.