Something’s up with Google’s Chrome operating system. Don’t know what, but we’ll all know soon as a press conference begins at 10AM Pacific. I’m coming at your live from the Googleplex. Buckle up, and we’ll see what’s happening. You can also watch from home. Webcast info is here.

There will also be related coverage developing at Techmeme, including news the Chrome OS source code is now apparently live. as Google’s Matt Cutts has tweeted.

And we start. Sundar Pichai says not launching today. A year away from that but have made constant progress and will show demo of what they’ve got so far and how will go to market. But primary reason is as of today the code will be fully open. Developers internally will work on the same tree as those internally.

Where at after a year since the Chrome browser? 40 million users, 39X faster JavaScript than Internet Explorer. Most users who use Chrome send most common feedback that Chrome is fast. 19 stable releases. Lots of work on HTML 5 to push web forwad.

Chrome for Mac is close to launch. “Looking at the number of Macs in the room, I’m excited about it.” Linux will come. Nearing the point of releasing Chrome Extensions.

Talk about wanting ways to do better graphics, video/audio playback, multiprocessor use.

Three industry trends.

Huge “phenomenal” growth in netbooks. Users view them and response as ultrathin ultralight PC.

Hundreds of millions of uses live in the cloud.

Phones are effectively becoming like computers, while laptops are more like phones (in terms of always on connectivity and long power, lighter to carry.

Looking at all these trends, the question we ask ourselves, is there a better model of computing we can give our users. We think so, and that’s what Google Chrome OS is.

Focused on speed, security and simplicity. No applications. All in the browser. Easy to use. We want it to be possible for people to share machines and feel comfortable with that.

Since no applications installed on the system, they can monitor stuff — completely inside the browser security model.

And now we’re about to see a live demo. Here’s a video I shot of this portion (live blogging continues below it):

Applications run in tabs, like in a browser. you can pin a tab to make it an “application tab” so you can easily go back to it. There’s also an app menu.

There are also panels. Light weight windows you can have all the time. Showing a chat window for Google Talk, for example. There’s a notepad panel. Where’s that data go. It sync to the cloud, shows up in Google Docs (so is the cloud in Chrome OS = Google’s own cloud?).

Doing search for Beautiful Day on Google, using OneBox to start playing music in a persistent window.’

Now we’re playing chess. Chrome OS version of Solitare?

Now showing Google Books and how you can go in full screen mode and use this as an ereader.

It’s common for people to have multiple windows, but so far, we’ve been in one window. But you can easily move to different Chrome “instances.” IE, multiple desktops. If you have a Mac, you know of this as Spaces (which are awesome by the way.”

Shows how you can browse files. Pulls an Excel app up. Clicks on it and shows how it launches the Microsoft Excel app, stressing this means the OS isn’t locked to Google or a particular cloud.

Now taking picture with an Android phone. Now showing how you can bring it up in Chrome. Hey that’s me. Ugh! Took a picture of us in the front :)

Now Matt (and I didn’t get his last name, sorry — but it’s not Cutts) is talking Chrome under the hood. They want to be like a TV, instant on, book out of RAM and fast rather than from a hard drive. Not to load things that aren’t needed, like a bios or OS call to find non-existent floppy drives.

Security. Chrome checks on each boot, a “verified” boot, “we double check that you’re running what you should be running.” They check for the cryptographic signatures. See, big word. it’s safe. Let’s call it a digital signature.

Now let’s say the signature check fails for some reason, such as with malware or some other reason. They find it happens, do the detection, system repairs itself. System does fresh download, and restarts. It essentially reimages your computer. But without the pain. Made in a way where all your system data is saved. “You don’t lose anything in the process.”

How make sure applications don’t harm your machine? Applications on operating systems now have full control. In Chrome OS, apps are all web apps, which have different security model, where the browser takes pains to assume they’re hostile. They can’t do things to your hard drive or system. So in Chrome, the system uses “security sandboxing” and basically doesn’t trust the applications.

Every tab in Chrome OS separated from others. File system is locked down. Lots of technical stuff. But user data is constantly synced with the cloud. This has this wonderful property that if you … lose your device, you get a new one, log in, and it’s just the way you left it.

And now back to Sundar on how to go to market. Says will talk much more next year. Working on the Google Chrome OS image, the software. Don’t support hard drives. Only solid state. Only some wireless adapters (I think he said). So you want to run this on any old computer? Might not work. “You would have to go buy a Chrome OS device in the marketing … our timeframe is next year .. want to make holiday season.”

And now we get a movie explaining to us in basic terms on how Chrome OS is better. Like how if it doesn’t take 45 seconds to boot, you could make a sandwich.

It all sounds so perfect. Kind of like those Mac ads. Be cool if it “just worked” in the way the Mac is supposed to but doesn’t always.

What about when you’re on a plan and offline? You can cache material locally and play, videos, etc.

Can you run it in a virtual machine today? They do for developers. A virtual machine is a great way to do that.

Android apps won’t run on Chrome Apps.

Mike Arrington  from TechCrunch asks, really, no way to run third party apps? The current plan is to support web apps, so they feel they are supporting third party apps. Arrington says that’s what Steve Jobs said about the iPhone. Sundar says it is different on larger form factors (in other words, I think, since you’re not running a cutdown browser, what happens on a “real” computer will work on a Chrome OS machine.

Business model on Chrome? Full free, fully open source. As more people use the web, it benefits Google as a company.

Question. What was demoed, can’t I do that with any browser logged into various cloud services? As a model of computing, Google thinks things are much different.

What if cloud is down? How can Google be trusted with the data?

If cloud is down, that affects people on computers now. You can’t get to email, for example. As for trust, really important that users have choice. Users are always in control. You can decide what to do.

And now Sergey Brin has come in and been invited up to the Q&A.

Plans to be like an second OS that could be booted? Not a focus.

Question again on devices. How’s it going to handle things like printers? Sundar: plan to support all standard keywords, mice, anything that identifies itself as a standard storage. Looking at printers. Yes, Chrome OS will print.

Question to Sergey on competition and how things have changed with Google making its own laptops. He responds:

Call us dumb businessmen, but we focus on user needs … rather than competitors .. so this is meant to fill a need.

And the session concludes. Also see the Google blog post here.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Danny gets to have all the fun and live blog the event, while I get to watch all the videos posted to the various Google blogs. There is a dummy video on the Google Blog and more technical videos on the Chrome blog. Here they are all those videos:

Typically, when Google shows a PDF document in the Google search results, you see a link to “view as HTML,” in the snippet. Here is a picture of what you see most of the time:

Now, it appears Google is showing a link that reads just “View” and links you to the PDF within a Google Docs view. Please note that this happens on some PDFs and not all. Here is a picture of that:

When you click on “View” it takes you to Google Docs. For example, for the search [triangle heights concurrency] you can see the View link and when you click on it, you are taken here, to Google Docs.

Hat tip to Google Operating System for spotting this.

Google wants to make the internet faster. By speeding up the “most important computing platform of our time,” Google believes that consumers and businesses will experience a wide range of benefits, many of which we can imagine, some of which might be revealed over time.

There’s no product or specific consumer offering here. Rather Google is trying to advocate multiple initiatives in parallel that the company believes are important to usher in a better, faster internet (including for mobile devices). This Google Code Blog post lays out the arguments and suggestions as does the video below:

Google very much needs third party participation and cooperation and so has established this site to teach best practices and offer tools to speed up websites. In addition, Google says it will seek to advocate broadband friendly practices in Washington D.C. and abroad.

One can pretty easily understand Google’s motives. A faster internet means more usage and a better online infrastructure means that the web and the browser become better development platforms.

Theoretically no technology company should object; all would presumably benefit from a faster and more user-friendly internet. The fourth bullet of the Google post, about the so-called White Spaces initiative, is where some controversy might creep in to the broader effort:

While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC’s decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry

Not everyone, chiefly incumbent ISPs and maybe wireless carriers, would be so happy with cheaper, more accessible broadband. Depending on ultimate retail cost it could be somewhat disruptive to current ISP and WiFi business models. But all that remains to be seen.

Google is clearly pursuing self-interest here but in this case self interest would appear to be broadly aligned with the interests of other web companies and the public more generally.

Yet another privacy complaint has been filed against Google with the FTC, this time by the Electronic Privacy Information Center over Google’s cloud computing services and related privacy and data security issues. While Google is the named party, the company is basically the stand-in for “the cloud” as a whole. (If you want to read the complaint, you can download it here [.pdf].)

Here’s the thrust of the complaint:

EPIC hereby petitions the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google’s Cloud Computing Services, to determine the adequacy of the privacy and security safeguards, to assess the representations made by the firm regarding these services, to determine whether the firm has engaged in unfair and/or deceptive trade practices, and to take any such measures as are necessary, including to enjoin Google from offering such services until safeguards are verifiably established. Such action by the Commission is necessary to ensure the safety and security of information submitted to Google by American consumers, American businesses, and American federal agencies.

The three services mentioned in particular are Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs. EPIC successfully filed a similar action against Microsoft’s Passport service and won fines and concessions.

The complaint asserts that Google represents to the public that its online services are secure but, EPIC argues, there are known flaws and Google disclaims any responsibility for privacy or security breaches. It claims that Google’s data security practices are inadequate as they stand, and so on.

Privacy has re-emerged as a serious issue and big consumer concern on a number of fronts.

Without saying anything about the merits of the complaint and whether the EPIC claims are accurate, the issues raised are important as we move into the cloud-computing era very rapidly. Mobile access to Internet content and services will further accelerate this trend.

Update: I spoke briefly to a Google spokesperson yesterday and he had this to offer on the record:

“We have received a copy of the complaint but have not yet reviewed it in detail. Many providers of cloud computing services, including Google, have extensive policies, procedures and technologies in place to ensure the highest levels of data protection.  Indeed, cloud computing can be more secure than storing information on your own hard drive.  We are highly aware of how important our users’ data is to them and take our responsibility very seriously.”

It also struck me after I wrote the item above that there’s something perhaps unnecessarily “vindictive” in EPIC’s complaint that singles out Google. The issues raised are serious but pertain not only to Google but to Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and others. So it’s curious that the complaint was only filed against Google. In addition the language of “deception” is quite aggressive.

Everyone has an interest in ensuring better privacy and data security and EPIC is doing something helpful in raising the issues. But there are probably ways to address them at an industry level that are somewhat less “litigious.”

Over the weekend a confirmed Google Docs bug may have shared your private Google Documents with others, without your permission. Google said this “affected less than 0.05% of all documents.” What exactly happened?

“The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document,” Google said. Google then unshared those documents automatically and then “emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them.” In the mean time, data that could have been shared without knowledge and permission, could have been financial documents, personal correspondence and even more sensitive information. Clearly this does not look good for Google’s case in making Google Docs more appealing to enterprises.

I asked, how does Google think this security breach will impact those considering using Google Health to share their medical history with friend and doctors. Who knows who can get their hands on this information, if there is a security breach or an “inadvertent sharing” bug?

In the past day or so, I have spotted at least four somewhat major bugs with Google’s various products. They include Google sending dozens of unwanted SMS messages to thousands of users, Google’s safe filter not working properly, Google News using an unusually large font size and Google Docs has a major spam issue as well. Besides all of these issues, don’t forget about the huge malware issue with Google over the weekend.

Last night, for a period of four hours, Google was sending dozens and dozens of SMS messages to users over and over again. There are hundreds of complaints in the Google forums, where it took Google about four hours to isolate the issue. Many users report receiving 30 or more unwanted text messages. Google said the issue was with a “mobile aggregator used by many mobile providers.” Google recommends you call your mobile provider if you pay per text message and need a refund. The issue was resolved at about 1am (EST) this morning.

In addition, Google’s safe search image filter was stuck last night. Many users complained that they were unable to change the safe search filter. Google confirmed the issue and said they would issue a fix. The fix came at about about 2:30am (EST) this morning and now users can change their safe search preferences.

If you visit Google News, you may see an unusually large font size on the home page. Google confirmed the issue and said they are working on a fix. But it still seems to be impacting some users. I personally did not experience this problem.

Finally, Monday, I reported an influx of Google Docs spam. What happened was many users noticed dozens of new docs show up in their Google Docs list. These users tried to remove these unwanted Docs, but they kept on reappearing. Google confirmed the issue over the weekend and confirmed that no accounts have been compromised. This is not impacting all Google Docs users, but it is impacting a fair number of users. We do not yet have confirmed reports that it has been fixed yet.

Five bugs with Google in a matter of a few days. I would not classify any of these bugs as minor, especially the malware issue, SMS spam and Docs spam.

Google’s announced they’re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor.

Google’s written officially about the closures and changes in these posts:

• Turning Down Uploads at Google Video
• Farewell, Google Catalog Search
• Stopping development on Google Notebook
• Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor

Ending uploads to Google Video makes sense and was long in the cards. Back in 2007, as part of the Google Universal Search rollout, Google Video was transformed more into a meta video search service than a site for hosting videos. Video hosting has still been allowed since then, but Google-owned YouTube was clearly the leading property for this.

Google’s checking for me on whether this means YouTube will lift limits to allow for longer uploads. Generally, clips on YouTube have been only allowed if they are 10 minutes or less. Google Video had no such limits. Existing video content on Google Video will not be removed. The Google Video site has a FAQ about the changes. Picasa is another Google property that allows video hosting, added last October, but it also has a file size limit. Uploads to Google Video will end at some point in the next few months.

Google Catalogs is a service that long ago was effectively abandoned by Google, and it’s good to see them finally put a nail in its coffin. Google told me that Catalogs started as a useful way to experiment with its optical character recognition technology. These days, its OCR technology is more focused on Google Books.

Google Notebook closes, though those with existing accounts can continue to save material. New accounts won’t be allowed, however — nor will the service be further developed, and the Google Notebook Extension for browsers will no longer work. Google told me it makes more sense to close this when it offers other services that allow for notetaking, such as Google SearchWiki, Google Docs and Google Bookmarks.

Dodgeball, well, I never used it. The service was designed to allow people to easily connect with others near them via their cell phones. Google acquired Dodgeball with some fanfare in May 2005. Last April, the Dodgeball founders left disgruntled that further development hadn’t gone as they wanted. No exact closure date has been set other than in the next few months.

Jaiku is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter that never got out of the invite-only stage. The Jaiku code will be made available to anyone. Jaiku will be maintained as place for people to post as well, supported by volunteer Googlers. Unlike some of the other closures, there’s no corresponding product at Google that Jaiku replaces. IE — it has no Twitter competitor of its own.

Twitter competitor Pownce closed earlier last month. Facebook was reportedly interested in buying Twitter, but the company wasn’t interested in selling at that time, it was said. That probably leaves FriendFeed (founded by four former Googlers) as the closest Twitter competitor out there, though arguably it depends on Twitter itself for much of its oomph. It’ll be interesting to see if Google decides it’s interested in Twitter, given the Facebook interest — perhaps shuttering Jaiku is indicative of something more to come. Pure speculation here, of course. Twitter was cofounded by former Googler Evan Williams.

The Google Mashup Editor was a limited test product open by invitation. Google’s closing this, saying that its App Engine serves as a more powerful replacement. Support for Mashup apps will end in six months.

Overall, the product closures are similar to what happened with Yahoo a year or two ago, when it had some products that never took off or multiple ones that served the same audience (such as Flickr versus Yahoo Photos). Unlike Yahoo, Google seems to be moving far faster to consolidate these things (and without major internal criticism becoming public, as Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous “Peanut Butter Memo” at Yahoo). That’s probably a positive — unless you’re one of the few who really liked one of these services.

The closures come on the heels of Google writing publicly that it has laid-off 100 recruiters and may cut 70 engineering jobs. Google’s first-ever layoffs came last year, as part of consolidating its purchase of DoubleClick. More recently, it was well publicized that it was laying off a large number of independent contractors and temporary employees. Google engineers have long been at the top of the heap when it comes to the Google pecking order. Now, neither products nor engineers seem to have a protected status, as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript: Google contacted me to stress that they don’t expect to cut 70 engineering jobs. Rather, they have about that many people who might not be willing to relocate when three offices are closed. They hope most will. But if some can, then those people may leave Google — but the engineering positions will be filled by new hires.

Hal Varian is a UC Berkeley economics professor now on leave at Google as its Chief Economist. In that latter capacity Varian waxes poetic on the Google Blog about the “democratization of data” in the internet era.

The essence of his post is that volumes of relevant data, and tools to analyze and make sense of it, were historically available only to large enterprises at great cost. Now small businesses can get in on the act — and for little or nothing — because of the Internet and a range of Google services.

He’s absolutely correct at one level. But if the post was less a pitch there might have been a bit more ambivalence in it.

The widespread availability of information and online tools (i.e., Google) have enabled much in the way of growth for small businesses. But technology, the internet and the overload of information have also made life a great deal more complex. The always-on economy is a very mixed blessing for everyone. (And I owe my income entirely to it.)

The perpetual myth of technology is that it eliminates dreary or mundane tasks for people and creates more leisure time. In fact what it does is enable people to accomplish more in shorter periods of time. Productivity expectations rise accordingly. Leisure and pleasure often give way to the demands of more and more work.

The internet has also sped up time. We all now live in a “type-A” world, a world where there’s little time to reflect and consider the deeper meaning or implications of things. The current financial markets crisis is an example: the bailout package must be passed this week — or else.

While Google’s Varian celebrates the information economy, the democratization of data and its apparent bounty for small businesses, he might have acknowledged that the internet for all its benefits is not entirely without its costs to sleep and satisfaction.

Whatever your view, half empty or half full, we can never go back to a time when the only way to sell a used car was to put an ad in the local newspaper. Now there are at least 20 different sites online to place that same ad.

In an accelerating world characterized by the “paradox of choice,” with increasing volumes of information to manage and consider, we have almost no choice but to use search engines and services — like Google.

Google launched Google Sites, basically a relaunch of Jotspot but with many more features. In short, this new software allows teams to share much like you could with Microsoft’s SharePoint.

Google sites offers users five templates, as TechCrunch explains:

• Standard Wiki
• Dashboard where Google Gadgets can be embedded
• Blog-like template for announcements
• A file cabinet for file uploads
• A page for lists of items

Google Sites is free for all users, with a limited space of 10GB and limited support. Upgrading to Google Apps Premium gives you more support, storage, and administrative features. Google Sites currently doesn’t have an API yet, but that is reportedly coming soon.

The user permissions system works a lot like Google Docs, where you can assign specific user access to certain pages or sections. The wiki pages have RSS feeds. You can embed your Google Docs, spreadsheets, calendar, pictures, YouTube videos, and more into your pages.

Google posted sample screen captures over here for uses with company intranet, team projects, employee profile pages, classroom pages, and student clubs.

There is an incredible amount of buzz going on about this launch, and you can find many of the top articles on Google Sites at Techmeme.

The Google Docs blog has announced new features for the Google Docs suite of tools. You can now create subfolders to more easily organize your documents and can rename documents and folders from the toolbar (previously, you could only do this from the File menu). The toolbar has also been spiffed up.

In addition, Google has launched several new features for Google Presentations, including the ability to embed presentations into a page of any site. More details on the Presentations features below.

With this launch, Google Presentations has gotten a number of new features.

• Embed a presentation into any web site
• Import slides from another (Google or Powerpoint) presentation
• Drag and drop an image from any web page into a presentation slide
• Easily rearrange slides with new control options
• Easily change the slide background

The blog described these new presentations with a slide presentation embedded into the post via the new embedding functionality.That seems slick, but may not be the best way of presenting the content from an SEO or usability perspective.

Here’s what the post looks like with the presentation embedded:

And here’s that same embedded presentation as viewed in a browser with Javascript and images turned off:

This feature seems like a great way to display presentations on your site, but may not be the best way to publish content. Much like Flash, it’s an easy way to display content in a — well, flashy way — but the text may be unreachable by search engines, mobile browsers, screen readers, and visitors with older browsers, slow connections, or who simply have things like Javascript and images turned off by choice.

Many sites and blogs likely will find good uses of this new feature, but webmasters may not want to use it to deliver textual content. The same advice applies here as applies to technologies such as Flash, video, and audio:

• Use sparingly
• Use primarily for illustrative content that’s not best represented in text
• Provide textual clues about the content by using things like headings, descriptive summaries, and captions
• Include a transcript of written or spoken content