Google should be man enough to admit it gets it wrong every now and then, rather than blame the most unlikely sounding of bugs for a hard of thinking moment.

There I was on Thursday morning, sitting in the DaniWeb offices in New York with the CEO, both of us recovering from an Internet Week after party the night before. I needed to look for something on Google and to the surprise of us both a hideous thing happened: instead of the slick and minimal Google page everyone is used to, a monstrosity appeared before us. The full-screen colour image was so distracting that it was actually hard to remember what I had gone to search for. Text on the page below the search box had all but vanished in the eye-straining confusion.

“Is this for real” asked Dani, the CEO sitting beside me “and can I switch it off?” My answer, after doing a quick bit of ironic Googling, was yes and no. Yes, it was for real and according to the newsfeeds at the time it was some kind of nod to those users who like to customise everything, and anyway, Bing has images. No, you could not switch it off but you could change the image. Great, I could have a picture of a tree or something else from the very limited set on offer, but I could not go back to what made Google great, a whole page of nothing much.

Neither of us could believe what we were seeing, and both agreed it was bad news. Then I went and started a 17 hour journey home via Dublin. By the time I reached Dublin airport and ‘borrowed’ the business lounge WiFi to check my email, a funny thing had happened: Google had gone back to normal. It was no longer Google, the Bing Edition.

So what, exactly, had happened here?

I could speculate with some humorous ideas, but even the most ridiculous of arguments would not be as unbelievable nor silly as the official version of events so I’ll stick with that. It seems that the Bingness of Google was ‘an experiment’ that was meant to last just for a day in order to gauge user reaction. Instead it was pulled 10 hours early due to ‘a bug’ that caused a link which explained all of this to vanish.

Yeah, right. One of the biggest names on the web let an experiment free on its home page, used by hundreds of millions of people every day, without checking that everything worked first. NOT. Let me repeat that, NOT. I’m sorry go ogle but I plain don’t believe you, unless you put Mr Hardofthinking in charge for the day and I doubt that happened either. Or there really is a bug whose only effect is to make an important link vanish from view. Actually, there could be such a thing and it could be called the ’someone forget to include the link’ bug I guess.

However, it seems much more likely that so many people had he same “WTF?” reaction to this image madness that both the DaniWeb CEO and myself experienced, and enough of them complained to Google to make the company realise the folly of it’s decision and pull the thing before it managed to do the impossible and kill the web’s biggest property stone dead withy a single well aimed if rather daft bullet.

We have already been looking forward to the Nexus Two here at IT Pro, but it seems that the Nexus One hasn’t actually done as well as the Google publicity machine would have us believe.

Despite all the hype and the almost Apple-alike media circus that followed the launch of the Nexus One, sales have not exactly set the world on fire. As Vodafone reports that it delivered an impressive 50,000 iPhones to customers on the first day of sale here in the UK, so we can reveal that market analysts are claiming Google could only shift an estimated 20,000 Nexus One units in the first week.

OK, I appreciate that this is not apples and apples being compared here, if you’ll excuses the pun, but the argumental swing is surely in favour of Google on this occasion. After all, the iPhone is nothing new, and has been available in the UK for an absolute age. All that is new here is that someone other than O2 is selling it. For Vodafone to shift 50,000 units into an already pretty well saturated market in just 24 hours is nothing short of miraculous.

For Google, on the other hand, to launch what was widely expected to be an iPhone killer into an eager market of early tech adopters keen to get their hands on the first ever real Google phone and then only shift 20,000 units in a whole week is dire. In fact it is more than dire, it is a bloody big FAIL.

Flurry, the market analyst making the sales figure claims on the back of monitoring Android app usage, blames a lack of true wow factor as well as the distribution/marketing model. “Google chose to market and sell the device to consumers directly through its own website” Flurry explains, concluding “while this distribution strategy is among the most innovative facets of the Nexus One launch, and a threat to carrier control of the consumer relationship, a series of customer service and other mistakes reveal Google’s lack of retail experience”.

Google has yet to confirm or deny the sales figures.

We’ve had the battle of the apps and now it’s the battle of the handset. But after all the hype, it has not been the greatest start for Google and the Nexus One phone - maybe we should be looking forward to the Nexus Two and all that might bring with it?

After all there has been the family of the late author Philip K. Dick apparently talking about suing Goggle for intellectual property infringement over the use of the name Nexus. Dick wrote the book ‘Do Androids’s Dream of Electric Sheep’ upon which the film Bladerunner was based, Any self-respecting geek will know that the replicants in the novel are Nexus 6 model androids. What with the Google Android OS and all, the link seems somewhat coincidental despite claiming it was used in the generic and original sense of the place where things converge. I doubt that Google will have much trouble in making any legal action go away, to be honest. However, it may have more trouble making some of the bad feeling of early adopters vanish.

It would appear that Google is learning the hard way that there is quite a difference between being a new media giant and a mobile phone supplier. Reports are coming in of forums being flooded with unhappy customers looking for support, and unfortunately often finding it. Unlike mobile operators which are well geared up to dealing with customer complaints and queries, Google is discovering that it just doesn’t have the kind of support setup that is required when selling this kind of hardware direct to the public. People are, it seems, unhappy about the email only support especially when it can take between one and two days to reply. People are also unhappy about the confusion over support when they approach their mobile network operator or the handset manufacturer, HTC, which seem to be playing a game of support switcheroo - referring customers to each other for help which isn’t forthcoming.

But some Americans are now getting a little hot under the unhappy collar because it has been rumoured that the European version of the Nexus One will be getting the multitouch support that has been much requested, and much moaned about in its absence. A reviewer in Germany is said to have been given a review model with just such support, in the form of iPhone-alike pinch-zooming, and even though this has been denied by Google on one Google Mobile help page it does point towards what we can expect to see in the Nexus Two.

Indeed, the Next Generation Nexus could also look to take on more than the iPhone if some reports are to be believed. Techwhack suggests that the Nexus Two could be aimed at taking on the Blackberry market by being enterprise ready and even come complete with a physical keyboard to replace the rather criticised virtual version found on the Nexus One.

Whatever shape and form the Nexus Two does take, I would suggest it needs to be a significant step up and offer something much more innovative that the Nexus One which has, to be honest, turned out to be just another Android from HTC albeit one carrying a Google logo on the back. Think of this as being just the first step towards speeding up Android hardware adoption, getting the Google branding out there in the mobile handset market. The Nexus One is no iPhone killer in any shape or form, but given the success in terms of both sales and media coverage I imagine that the Nexus Two and Nexus Three will arrive in fairly quick succession and Google will, as always, learn from its mistakes.

The big question is, of course, what would you like to see in terms of truly innovative functionality for the Nexus Two that might encourage you to actually buy one.

Is Google really 11 years old? Is it really that long ago that we all used AltaVista and couldn’t imagine anyone doing search better than that? The answer to both questions is yes, possibly.

Happy 11th birthday Google. Well at least I think that’s right. Maybe.

To celebrate, Google has a special logo of course. No UFO inspired nonsense to get the conspiracy theorists conspiring, just a rather clever use of a double ‘l’ to represent the number 11 instead. Nice. I actually prefer this one to the 10th birthday effort which seemed a bit forced, although the cupcake for the first o was inspired, replacing the e with an 0 just didn’t work on anything but a surrealist level.

The odd thing is, of course, that the 10th birthday logo did not appear on the 27th September 2008, but instead celebrations started on the 2nd. I’m a little confused as to why that might be, especially as the Google domain name was registered on the 15th September while company incorporation papers were submitted on the 4th. If anyone has a clue as to how Google picks a birthday date, please do let me know.

Actual date aside, Google was definitely launched upon the world in 1998 and this got me to remembering what I was doing PG: pre-Google. Well, I was doing the same as everyone else who was online at the time, and that was thinking that AltaVista was the dogs doo-dahs. Nobody expected the Google upstart, despite the wonderfully minimalist interface, to be anything other than a minor distraction in the world of search back in 1998. If you were not using AltaVista, and I’d have to ask why not as it really did rock back then, you were probably searching courtesy of some other long forgotten by most engine with names like Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot or even Yahoo! OK, the latter has not been forgotten although it did go through a period when most of us would have been happy to forget it, truth be told. Oddly, back in 1997, Microsoft wasn’t really considered a search player although the launch of MSN Search around the same time as Google if my memory serves me well did start to change all that.

Now, and I’ll admit it, I cannot imagine using anything other than Google as my primary search weapon. It’s always primed and ready to fire, generally hits the target without too much collateral damage, and I don’t need to read an instruction manual before I pull the trigger. Happy Birthday Google - I wonder if you will still be king of search in another 11 years, or whether you will just be remembered as the new AltaVista?

When it comes to smartphone technology, fans of both the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android-based handsets are pretty vocal to say the least. I am on dodgy ground to even contemplate suggesting that one is better than the other, so I thought I might let the applications do the talking. Well, the respective App Store and Android Market numbers at any rate.

There’s no doubting that Android is growing fast when it comes to the applications side of things, with figures from Android app experts Androlib suggesting that the Android Market (the equivalent of the iPhone App Store) has grown by something in the region of 440% in just four months. Indeed, sources suggest that there are now between 9,000 and 10,000 applications available for download from the Android Market.

Pretty impressive stuff. Until you look at the iPhone App Store numbers that is. A couple of months ago Apple announced it had hit the 1.5 billion downloaded apps target, with some half a billion of them happening in the preceding quarter alone. Indeed, Apple reckons that only 2% of iPhone users have NOT downloaded an application from the App Store. On average, we are told, iPhone users will spend USD $80 on applications. In terms of choice, well the iPhone really is short circuiting the Android right now, with a staggering 65,000 plus applications available to download from the App Store. A number which would be even more impressive were it not for the strange Apple habit of rejecting perfectly acceptable applications on somewhat dodgy grounds. My particular favourite being putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Adolf Hitler.

Can the Android catch up? Or perhaps the question should be does it want to? Some industry commentators are suggesting that it cannot because “Android is just a hobby for the company, and it will never be able to match Apple’s marketing prowess” and you know what, I think they may just have a point.

Reading the Apple response to the Federal Communications Commission questions regarding the non-appearance of Google Voice at the iPhone App Store is a bit like listening to a child explaining to the teacher why homework was not handed in on time.

What Apple has used so far are a vast range of reasons as to why Google Voice has not been granted App Store approval. It’s still being evaluated, is the core excuse. It raises privacy concerns is another good one.

My favourite has to be that it changes the iPhone user experience. Here’s how Apple explained that one according to the written response by Catherine Novelli, Apple Vice President: by replacing the core mobile phone voice functionality as well as the Apple iPhone interface it makes things different. Yes that is it, in a nutshell. Like almost every app in fact, it makes things different. That’s kind of the point of them, don’t you think? But no, Novelli insists that “Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone” and obviously anything that makes it better is bad, m’kay.

And who can argue that wrapping up telephone numbers, voicemail, SMS, calls and contacts via a neat interface and from the one Google Voice number doesn’t make the iPhone experience a whole lot better?

Oh yes, Apple can, apparently.

If Google Voice does not make an appearance soon, I fully expect Apple to tell us that it is because the dog has eaten it.

Security expert Graham Cluley recently described a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack as being like “15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time”.

I wonder, in the case of the attack aimed at Twitter this week, if those would be 15 fat Russian men?

Unlike the previous Twitter willy waving massacre which we reported upon, this one was not aimed at followers but the service itself and succeeded in pretty much grinding it to a halt for much of the day.

The Twitter status pages yesterday first reported that the service was “defending against a denial-of-service attack” followed by the site coming back up but “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”. Twitter head honcho Biz Stone blogged Twitter was “working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack”. As to the motivation behind the event, Stone prefers not to speculate. Others are not so shy.

Take the aforementioned Mr Cluley, for example, who has asked the question “was Twitter denial-of-service targeting anti-Russian blogger?”

Cluley bases his question around the fact that the attack happened on the first anniversary of Georgian troops moving into South Ossetia, and the military conflict which followed. Twitter ground to a halt, but it looks like Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger services were also targeted.

Amazingly, there is now what appears to be informed speculation that the attacks were not so much against the services as against a single user of those services: an unlucky blogger and anti-Russian activist by the name of Cyxymu who hails from Tbilisi.

Max Kelly, the Chief Security Officer at Facebook has even gone on the record telling CNET News that Cyxymu was the target of the DDoS attack, with all his different accounts spread across the impacted sites being attacked at the same time.

Cluley points out that “Cyxymu’s YouTube channel is still available” and “contains a number of videos, many related to skirmishes between Russians and Georgians” before asking “could these have been the webpages that the denial-of-service attack was trying to blast off the internet?”

Twitter has managed to survive the likes of Moonfruit marketing and Koobface infections but surely it should have done better in protecting itself against the fat blokes in the revolving door? After all, Facebook and Google seemed to manage OK.

Harry Potter has been naked on Broadway, Ron Weasley has got swine flu, but Hermione Granger is emphatically not dead despite what you might read online. Let’s run that past you again. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter, has stripped off and bared all for his part in the Broadway production of Equus. Rupert Grint, the actor who plays Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films, has been reported as suffering from swine flu (as am I, for that matter, writing this from my bed with Tamiflu on tap). But the delightfully sexy Emma Watson, the actress who plays Hermione Granger in the incredibly successful series of movies based on the fantasy novels of JK Rowling is not dead.

I mention that because if, like me, you are a Twitter addict then you might think otherwise. News of her demise has been spreading like wildfire on the microblogging site. But then again it has been spreading like wildfire across the entire Internet it would seem. The hoax story falsely claims that Watson was killed at the scene of a fatal car crash, and has been distributed to coincide with the release of the latest movie in the series, Harry Potter and Half-Blood Prince.

This is not just the work of some sicko prankster, of course, but rather a malicious ploy to herd traffic towards rogue AV products which claim your computer is infected in order to persuade you to buy a fake AV application to clear the infection. The sting being that the product is no solution, will not clear any infections and will quite often just pile a load of malware onto your machine instead.

I would have to give to bad guys some grudging respect in as far as they have done a pretty comprehensive job of Google SEO poisoning in this case, with the rogue AV links being right up there on the first page of hits related to searches for Emma Watson’s death.

The reports themselves are pretty convincing as well, apart from the obvious spelling and grammar errors. Mind you, some genuine news reports are little better so this is not always a foolproof spoof identification methodology. I looked at some of them on a sand boxed machine here so that you don’t have to. “Police footage captured her driving with speeds up to 80 miles per hour on very narrow roads” says one report, and “Resuscitation efforts continued en route to the Oxfordshire’s Medical Center, and for an hour after arriving there at 1:45pm - she was pronounced dead at 2:10pm”. Or how about “The 19 year-old actress, most famous for her roles in the Harry Potter films, was killed while being driven back to hotel after a screening of her latest movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when a car collided with her vehicle”.

It isn’t the first time that Harry Potter has cast a spell over the Internet and it won’t be the last, however I do have a terrible feeling that with only a couple more movies to go before the franchise comes to an end the bad guys are going to be pumping Harry Potter for all it’s worth during the next couple of years.

There was a huge fanfare of media attention yesterday as Google proudly announced that one of the longest beta tests in software history, well it certainly felt like that, had finally come to end. Yes, the GMail webmail application that was launched on April Fool’s Day way back in 2004 has finally emerged from it’s beta status. So why has it gone straight back into beta today?

Apparently not everyone is comfortable with losing the beta sticker from their GMail service, it makes them feel a little uneasy or something. So those obliging people at Google have added a ‘Back to Beta’ configuration setting for the app, under the GMail Labs tab, which according to the description that accompanies it “soothes the soul by putting the familiar beta sticker back on the Google Mail logo.” Sigh.

Meanwhile, back in the sane world, Google seems to be admitting that the decision to remove the beta tag from Google Mail was taken to appease the business customers who feel uneasy buying into the whole Google Apps thing when there’s a bloody great big ‘Beta’ sticker on one of the key parts. So maybe we haven’t escaped the insanity after all.

Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise explains “Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it’s had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase.”

Whatever your opinion of the man and his music, there can be little doubting the impact that the death of Michael Jackson has had on the Internet. I was working late when I spotted the first message floating past on Twitter which said that Jackson had suffered a fatal heart attack. Of course, Twitter is not immune to the usual run of hoaxes and fakes, so I did not take much notice. At least not until the next message popped up on-screen within a few minutes, and pretty soon the unconfirmed news of the death of the King of Pop was pretty much dominating my Tweet stream. So it was I Googled ‘Michael Jackson’ only to warned that my query “looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.”

It would appear that Google mistakenly thought it was under attack, when in fact all that was happening was a huge spike in the need for information from millions of people around the world at the same time. You know, the kind of thing that Google was pretty much invented for, that the Internet is meant to do so well. Google called it a “meteoric rise in related searches” and “one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” In fact it admits that the Michael Jackson search spike was “so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack” and took those malware warning precautions.

Twitter wasn’t faring much better, with more than 60,000 Michael Jackson tweets posted in 60 minutes and causing a slowdown in service accessibility. I’ve heard tales of protestors in Iran being unable to get their Twitter updates which have served them so well, for example. Indeed, I have posed the question before that celebrities could be killing Twitter and on this occasion a celebrity managed to crash the site for a while.

I would have hoped, given just how important the Internet has become around the world, that such a news spike would be absorbed much better than this. If Google, Twitter and others struggled to stay working properly because of this, just what would happen if World War Three was declared? The kind of event for which we would, as a nation, as a planet, turn to the Internet for information and advice. So much for the network that could survive a nuclear attack, it couldn’t even cope with the death of a controversial pop star.