Over the years, I’ve managed to migrate all of our our operations to “the cloud,”  using web-based applications, as opposed to their desktop elders.

As I’ve written before (and preached to our clients), the benefits are numerous… No more having to maintain hardware and networks, instant sharing and collaboration with team members without needing an infrastructure, and so-forth.

One of the last hurdles (for me) was getting the ease-of-use I wanted, being able to work with what I need to work with, without having everything running as tabs in my browser.

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I have to admit, I was pretty suprised  when Google released its own web browser a few months back.

After all, it was really looking like they’d bitten off more than they could chew.

But, Google is the #1 web brand, and (it’s claimed) “the “best and the brightest” worked there, once, so…

I took a look, and wow… There were some shortcomings… There was no support for extensions, there were a lot of privacy concerns, and (surprise?)… It still had the Google “Beta” designation (it seems that everything from Google is in perpetual beta).

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I have to admit that I’m a “breaking tech news junkie,” and therefore, a major consumer of RSS feeds. My reader of choice is Google Reader, with which I spend a good hour each morning, along with my cup of coffee.

Late yesterday, Google released a face lift for my venerable friend, and after having spent some time with it, I have to admit that for the most part, I enjoy the changes.

Google billed the changes as improving on the appearance and performance of the previous version, and while appearance is subjective (I preferred the previous version), the improvements in performance and functionality are nice additions.

Read the complete announcement, including specifics of the changes, over in the Official Google Reader Blog.

Google announced yesterday that they’ve added video and audio chat to the Google Talk application.

It’s actually a pretty nifty addition to Google Talk (which is built-into GMail), allowing you to see (and speak with) clients, co-workers, and others using the Google Talk IM protocol.

Enabling video and audio chat requires that you install a very small plugin, which will add the capability to your browser.

However, Google doesn’t make it easy to find that plugin (at the time of this writing, the “How to guide” only mentions the need to download and install the plugin, but doesn’t tell you where to find it.

After a little digging-around, I found it here.

Currently, the plugin (and thus, the capability to video chat) is only available for Windows.

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