John Battelle has been on a roll of late, opining on a number of Internet topics I hold near and dear, particularly the competitive dynamic of the Big 5 of the Internet. Those would be Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook, and all of their walled gardens, another Battelle topic du jour.

Could Google Glasses one day join Google Goggles in the pantheon of the company's popular products? Perhaps. But, please, enough p-words. 9to5 Google said Google is building special glasses the look like Oakley's Thump MP3 sunglasses that actually have the computing firepower and features of today's high-end smartphones: That means voice input, output and a navigation system on board. There is a display with a computer interface and control buttons,

One of the big knocks on Google Wallet, the company's smartphone-based mobile payment service, is that it's only been available on one phone to date - the Samsung Nexus S from Sprint. That is no longer true. The Wallet app may be intalled and used on Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Nexus handsets fueled by SIM card from AT&T. Droid Life dropped the news , which stemmed from a Feb. 1 upgrade to the Wallet app. A Google spokesperson told me: Yes,

One of the leading knocks on Google's freewheeling, open approach to the Android Market is that it's leaves the application store more susceptible to malware and lots of spammy apps. Indeed, Symantec, Lookout Mobile and other security firms have reported a significant rise in Android Market malware in the last 12 months. And with over 200 million Android devices in the market, with 700,000 being activated daily, and over 300,000 Android apps in the Market,

Google continues to leverage its good work in HTML5 to enable its productivity and collaboration applications to work offline. The company is now letting users make any Google Docs available offline from their Android smartphone or tablet computer. This covers documents, Google presentations, Google spreadsheets, uploaded images, and files in formats such as .pdf, .doc, .xls and .ppt. Users may do this with or without a Web connection.

Google is getting a lot of flak about its new privacy policies, some of it warranted and some of it not. The fact is that Google has been heading along this path for years. One could argue the first indication was the Dashboard Google set up in 2009 to provide users more information about how they are creating data in Google's applications. http://www.eweek.

There is a long-held belief that the majority of Google App customers are small mom-and-pop shops, ranging between 2 and 10 employees. Technically, that is true of the 4 million-plus businesses using Google Apps. However, there are more companies of scale using Apps than you might think, according to a new analysis by Backupify. While 53 percent of Apps domains are comprised of 10 seats or fewer,

Danny Sullivan, the Search Engine Land who has been dogged in his criticism of Google's Search plus your world feature, scored a nice interview with the company's search head, Amit Singhal . If you've been following the SPYW coverage, you should read it because it reveals much about the company's mindset concerning the way it took the service to market. SPYW is the personal search feature that incorporates users' Google+ posts and photos in users' search results.

Google is providing two new perks for Google Music users, including the ability to shuttle their tracks from the music locker and share YouTube videos. Users have been able to upload up to 20,000 songs to the Google Music locker and play them on their Android smartphone or tablet since the full, non-beta service launched last November . However, once the music was there, that's it. Users could simply stream tracks.

The Verge Founder Josh Topolsky both marveled at and lamented the sheer volume of smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices trotted out at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. Topolsky hosted a panel where he pressed Samsung and HTC marketing executives on "whether or not technology manufacturers were simply producing too many gadgets, outpacing real consumer demand with iterative, insubstantial changes.

Ever since Facebook Product Director Blake Ross unveiled his Don't Be Evil bookmarklet, which uses Google's search indexes to show what Google Search, plus your world would look like if it included results from Facebook, Twitter and other sources, the tech world has been waiting for Google to respond. There will be no response, at least not publicly, not now. As I understand it from speaking with sources familiar with Google's thinking, Google isn't convinced the bookmarkelt,

Google has upgraded the Hotel Finder travel search feature, adding an option to help users filter hotels by how close they want to be to a place when looking for a place to stay. Launched last July to help travelers narrow their options for hotel stays, Hotel Finder surfaces hotels in densely populated cities by selecting an initial shape for users based on what's most popular. At launch, users could refine their hotel search by cost price per night,

Over at VentureBeat , Rocky Agrawal is outraged at Google for being "intellectually dishonest" regarding the user engagement the company is seeing in its Google+ social network. As I noted Saturday , Google CEO Larry Page counted 90 million Google+ accounts, but declined to say how frequently users were accessing +, what they were doing there and for how long. These are key user engagement statistics. Facebook shares tons of them. Google won't.

Google Apps, the cloud-based collaboration software for businesses, is set to turn 5 years old next month. Google celebrated early in landing BBVA bank as its largest Google Apps deployment to date, spanning 110,000 employees. BBVA, which is short for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A., is the second largest bank in Spain and 7th largest financial institution in the Western world, according to Wikipedia . BBVA operates in over 40 countries. So it's darned big. Importantly,

Google has really revved its Google+ engine in this second full week of the new year. One day after I discussed the new Google+ photo meme feature and auto-complete search for hashtags , the company has rolled out a handful of new tools to refine the user experience. I'm going to start with my favorite: the ability to join conversations from search results on Google+ by sharing to a topical stream. Do a search for, say, Android and get the results.

The Google+ team has added a fun new feature to photos - the ability to add text within pictures. Take this picture I snagged at CES last week. Before sharing it on Google+, I click add text: See here the options to add text above in the middle of, or below the picture: Then I choose the text typeface. You can also write something in the post's text box above the picture: And voila, I share the photo with my stream: Google will be checking for funny,

I attended the high-tech tour de force known as the Consumer Electronics Show last week for two days in Las Vegas, my second year in a row covering the show. People have painted the show as increasingly irrelevant. Microsoft didn't help when he vowed to pull out as keynote going forward, but CES still draws huge crowds. The Consumer Electronics Association said some 153,000 people attended the show this year, a new record. CEA noted: More than 20,

With anyone else, we call this outburst chutzpah, but this being media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and Murdoch almost always showing a propensity for saying Murdochian things, we'll view this following Jan. 12 tweetburst via Twitter as de rigeur. Basically, Murdoch called out President Barack Obama and Google over the White House's position on the Stop OnlIne Piracy Act )SOPA(,

There's little question now that Google has stepped into it big time with regard to Search, plus your world, the feature that personalizes search by incorporating Google+ posts and photos in users' search results. Users who are signed in, are officially sheep to Google's supposed well-meaning shepherd, as the company guides users to a wonderful, walled garden where it can serve them more ads. There's no question there are great efficiencies, along with amusing time wasting,

One of my last stops here at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 11 was to check out what Marvell Semiconductor had done for Google TV. Few will disagree chipsets aren't as sexy as smart TVs, Blu-ray players or companion boxes, but Marvell aims to be the chief processor OEM for all of those kinds of devices after Intel bowed out gracefully when first-generation Google TV systems from Sony and Logitech failed to sell well.