Tech Industry Falls for 'Cloud Computing'

Eric Jackson says the web's top companies never seem to last

(NEWSER) - Right now, Google and Facebook seem invincible, but in five to eight years they could well be gone, argues Eric Jackson in Forbes . "Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone." After all, it's happened to loads of web giants before them. The more you look at the Internet, the more "it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born," he argues. Just look at Yahoo, now "a shell of its 2000 self." More»

Blogs report conflicting information on 'Google Circles'

(NEWSER) - Google will soon launch a social network, blogs are saying, and it may be called Google Circles. The tech blog The Next Web first reported the news Friday, noting that the product would launch at Google’s I/O conference in May; ReadWriteWeb followed with an assertion that the new service would be announced at South By Southwest. Google knocked down the latter claim, but refused to “comment on rumor and speculation” about the service itself, the Telegraph reports. More»

Cloud Connect lets you work in Word, save online

(NEWSER) - Google has found a way for users to edit documents online without having to navigate a new application—bringing us a step closer to a cloud computing revolution. The search giant has built a plug-in for Microsoft Office that syncs it with Google Docs, TechCrunch reports. With the Cloud Connect plug-in, you can edit your document in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and save the changes on your computer and online. More»

Esquire : Sites that were before their time

(NEWSER) - Everything old is new again, especially on the Web. Some of today's tech darlings owe a lot to websites of years past. Here are some of Esquire's 15 favorite, and mostly kaput, Web 1.0 pioneers:

1. Dodgeball (2000) "A location-based social network for mobile devices, and the Internet's gift to stalkers," says Esquire. Today's Foursquare was co-created by one of its founders.

From Facebook to bank accounts, online afterlife a thorny legal area

(NEWSER) - These days grieving relatives have a new problem to contend with: managing the Facebook, Flickr, and eBay accounts of the dead. As people trust ever more of their lives to the Internet, from email and online banking to identities on Second Life, very few have considered what exactly will happen to all that online data when they die, the Washington Post reports—and new businesses are popping up to help the heirs of the dearly departed access everything from password-protected photographs to money. More»