“To improve the experience of our customers, we now provide 24 x 7 phone support to small, medium, and large Google Apps for Business customers for all issues affecting the core services,” Google says on its blog. “Our customers may also receive support through our web-based support portal, online help forms, and online help center. All support cases are handled directly by trained Google Apps experts.”

Google Apps for Business was first introduced in 2007 to compete with traditional office suites, including Microsoft Office. A free version is limited to 10 users within the same domain and allows users to send a maximum of 500 emails per day per email account. Email attachments are limited to 25 megabytes or less. The business version (Google Apps for Business) features e-mail spam and malware filtering through Postini before it is delivered to a client's mail server, API’s for single sign-on, a 99.9 percent e-mail uptime guarantee, and now 24/7 telephone support, among other features.

U.S. based business and education customers can reach Google support at 877-355-5787, international customers can dial 1-404-978-9282. Photo: Public Domain

Users did always have the option to set the Facebook site as their default homepage, but now they see the option on top of their site. The move could further cool the relationship between Facebook and Google that escalated last week after the social networking site announced a new messaging service that competes with Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail.

Facebook surpassed Google as the number one destination for U.S Internet in March 2010. The site has removed all notes mentioning Google from the "Find your Friends" feature. Google blocked users earlier in the year from importing Facebook friends via Gmail.

While Google did say that it will continue to integrate social layers into existing services, it might also opt to develop its own social networking service by acquiring startups like Diaspora (ip-192.com reported here.)

Facebook just surpassed Google as the number one destination for U.S. Internet traffic in March 2010.

"As a first cut, we implemented support for Facebook, Twitter, and email via Gmail," says Mozilla on its Lab blog. "We picked those because they’re popular, have good API support for authorization using OAuth, and in the case of GMail, provide APIs to contacts, which makes for a good auto-complete experience."

Mozilla says that it plans to extend F1 functionality to support more sharing services if they advertise to the browser and offer a sharing API. Publishers can use an experimental share API to the navigator object. The feature allows website owners to add share buttons to specific items within the page. When a user wants to share the content, the F1 share panel will open.

The success of F1 will eventually depend on whether Mozilla incorporates the extension into its Firefox browser or continues to offer it as a downloadable add-on. More information about F1 and a short video explaining how the extension works is available here. The site contains a link that allows users to download the extension.

"Waves" are hosted XML documents that allow users to concurrently modify content. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part, and add additional users at any point in the process. Team members are notified of any changes, additions or replies in all collaborations (or waves) they are actively participate. All changes are visible in real time if users are online, but they can be displayed in chronological order later.

Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. Now, everybody with a Google account can sign in and start a new Wave.

On the first logon, a "Welcome to Google Wave!" will tell users that they can use the service for:

• Live discussion: let everyone have a voice;
• Task tracking: stay on top of who needs to do what;
• Meeting agendas: leave a meeting on the same page;
• Document creation: draft content and gather feedback in one place;
• Brainstorming: let the creative juices flow;
• …or just start with a blank wave and see where it takes you!

Google Waves can be confusing at first, but several videos available on YouTube explain how to use the service efficiently.

Google already facilitates status messages that display under user names in the instant-message chat area of its webmail client. The new feature will allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with. It will also make it easier for users of Google's web-based email service to share links, content and media with friends from video-sharing sites such as YouTube, and photo-sharing service Picasa. Google has refused to comment; however, it is holding a press conference on Wednesday to "unveil some new products and innovations".

Google is facing increasing competition from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which dominate the social web. “Anything Google does with Gmail should be seen as a defensive maneuver,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner.