UPDATE: I added a response from Google. When Google bought Jaiku last October it spawned a great deal of talk about whether Google would be looking to throw its weight behind a micro-blogging service to lure people tired of Twitter's downtime. Well, that was a long, long time ago, making some of feel that we were in a galaxy far, far away. In subsequent months,

UPDATED: This version adds and corrects some facts from my original August 21 piece. My source claims Google admitted to condoning behavioral targeting on its content network. However, he says Google never told him they were using deep packet inspection to enhance behavioral targeting efforts . The House Energy and Commerce Committee August 1 sent Google and other companies a list of questions regarding their online advertising practices.

The Wall Street Journal has shagged a nifty scoop about Google and Verizon apparently burying their spiteful hatchets to work together on mobile search. In the deal, Google would become the default search engine on phones sold by Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. wireless provider. This sounds pretty much like the deal Google struck with phone maker Nokia in February . Google is also the default search engine on Sprint devices and Apple's iPhones. At the time,

Two weeks ago, Google stated unequivocally in this letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee that it does not use deep packet inspection, or DPI, to bolster its online ad efforts. Recently, a person who challenges Google regularly on privacy issues told me that they confirmed to him privately that they do behavioral ad targeting with DPI. Deep packet inspection, or DPI, is a form of computer network packet filtering that examines the header part of a data packet.

You may have heard Google is planning to set up an 8,000 square-foot "Big Tent" for bloggers covering the Democratic convention in Denver next week. Attendees will be able to see demonstrations of Google Apps. We can't accuse Google of partisan politics here; this effort will be roughly duplicated at the Republican convention in Minnesota next month. But what we may accuse Google of,

Update: Looking to capitalize on the popularity of the U.S. political races, Google's Reader team has created Google Power Readers in Politics , which includes links to favorite content from major political journos and the U.S. presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. Google Reader's Chrix Finne said in a blog post, "[We] can read what they read, and see what's on their minds as they share and discuss news.

Google makes some useful widgets that we can use for our iGoogle custom home pages. Today the search company may have scored a great coup in the battle of broken links, mistyped URLs, broken Web page links and deleted content with a custom widget that lets Web site owners help their visitors find what they are looking for. Called "Enhance 404 pages,

Is Facebook's flash fading? In a sign that apparently the grass is not always greener on the other side, Ben Ling, Google Checkout guru turned Facebook Platform Product Marketing Man is reportedly rejoining Google after less than a year at the popular social network, wrote Kara Swisher on AllThingsDigital . Swisher said Ling is rejoining Google to work on the YouTube team, but he didn't confirm this for her and Google refused to comment for me this weekend.

Google today appealed to the public for help in freeing up white spaces, the unused spectrum between channels 2 and 51 on analog TV sets that will be abandoned when we switch to digital TV next year, with a new petition initiative called Free The Airwaves. Free the Airwaves comes after the FCC completed its white spaces field testing; the agency is expected to make a ruling on white spaces in the coming months. There is a war being waged over what to do with white spaces.

In response to the horrified rabble over how contacts are shared in its Google Reader application, Google has taken a step back from designating anyone who exchanges messages on Google Talk as friends and sharing that content with Reader users. The issue came to light last December when Google linked up Reader with its Google Talk chat app to make shared items visible to friends from Google Talk. When a user logged into Reader,

Google's latest Gmail outage )from 2 p.m. PDT to 4 p.m. PDT Monday( was well documented and, coming less than one week after another major outage of Gmail and Google Apps , the company felt compelled to blog about it in the form of an apology sandwich. What's an apology sandwich? Well, the first sentence - the bottom piece of bread - is an apology. Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager wrote: "Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon,

The New York Times' Miguel Helft posed an interesting question in his weekend feature Sunday. His question is actually the headline of the piece, Is Google a Media Company? The meat of the matter swirls around Google's Knol service , a kind of encyclopedia where experts can write articles on topics and monetize their pages with ads served by Google.

When I read that Google filed a quarterly report in which it said it's $1 billion investment in AOL may be impaired, the first thing I thought was, gee, you think? AOL has been on a backward slide for awhile and, heartened as I was to see its willingness to fight it out in the online ad space with acquisitions like Bebo, I have to wonder what the company's future chances of surviving are.

What a week its been for Google's AdWords crew. One day after launching its Google Insights for Search extension for the Trends utility, the group has added a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network that will let advertisers access some new tools. Before advertisers get queasy stomachs over the keywords "DoubleClick," "ad-serving," "cookie," in that last sentence,

Google has sold its DoubleClick Performics unit, the albatross that many said would sink Google's credibility for owning a search marketing business that tries to influence search engine results. Publicis Groupe will buy the Performics search marketing business for an undisclosed sum by the close of the third quarter this year. Performics is one of the top search marketing services providers,

Google today released a new General Search Appliance, a box that can index 10 million documents, or five times as many files as the previous GSA. Matt Glotzbach, product management director of enterprise for Google, told me Google is trying to change the way companies and users think of enterprise software. Traditionally, enterprise software companies, and this includes enterprise search software, take to much time innovating, with long release cycles over multiple years.

Google's DoubleClick ad-serving unit, the group on which Google's video ad hopes hinge, said it can now serve video ads in video platforms forged with Microsoft Silverlight 2. Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash killer, is a programmable Web browser plug-in that lets users run animation, vector graphics and audio and video media. With the new feature in DoubleClick's In-Stream video-ad management tool,

Following a well-publicized pact between Salesforce.com and Google, SuccessFactors has integrated its performance and talent management SAAS )software as a service( suite with the Google Apps SAAS collaboration software and other tools. SuccessFactors, which boasts four million users in 2,000 customer businesses, offers Web-based software that helps gauge employee performance, including skill-sets, interests, career aspirations, ability to relocate and other details.

Yahoo has re-elected all of its nominees to its board of directors , closing a big chapter for the company in the wake of Microsoft's failed $44.6 billion acquisition attempt . The news came at the company's annual board meeting August 1, but not without some huffing and puffing from some shareholders. The board includes Carl Icahn, who wormed his way to a seat on the board and still covets a deal with Microsoft, and current Chairman Roy J. Bostock, Ronald W. Burkle,

IBM is pumping $360 million into a cloud computing data center in Raleigh, N.C. just a few months after Google opened a $600 million data center in Lenoir, N.C . Cloud computing is the catch phrase given to computing resources piped over the Internet, but hosted by a provider such as Google, IBM, Yahoo or Amazon. HP, Intel and Yahoo just launched a global cloud computing effort for academia earlier this week, so the space is certainly abuzz. The cloud arms race is on.