One week ago a new four-colored dialog box appeared in my Gmail account.  And I don’t mean some clunky square computer dialog box that we’ve all grown accustomed to, I mean an honest to goodness comic book style dialog box.

Clearly this was some new sort of chat functionality, which surprised me, as I already had a GTalk session open.

Apparently Google was launching it’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, and you know what, I couldn’t be bothered.  I already have all the personal social media tools I need.  In fact, I have more social media tools at my disposal than I …

Tuesday’s Google Apps and Gmail outage from 12:30 pm to 2:10 pm marks the company’s third high profile outage this year (the others were on January 31 and May 14).

This time around, more than half of Google’s free and business subscribers received an error message informing them that their browser could not connect with their e-mail server.

While the Gmail iPhone app was originally unaffected, some of its users eventually reported that their service went down as well.

Initial reactions in the blogosphere were fairly hostile, predicting that this most recent outage would give Google a black eye in its attempts to …