What is the Internet, exactly? To some of us, the Internet is where we stay in touch with friends, get the news, shop, and play games. To some others, the Internet can mean their local broadband providers, or the underground wires and fiber-optic cables that

carry data back and forth across cities and oceans. Who is right?

Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.

We’ve created an interactive map of Government Requests that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests.

Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country/region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. We hope this raw data will help facilitate studies about service outages and disruptions.

Building any large scale application has its hurdles, and GWT apps are no exception. Multiple developers working simultaneously on the same code base, while maintaining legacy features and functionality, can quickly turn into messy code. To help sort things out we introduce design patterns to create compartmentalized areas of responsibility within our project.
There are various design patterns to choose from; Presentation-abstraction-control, Model-view-controller, Model-view-presenter, etc... And while each pattern has its benefits, we have found that a Model-view-presenter (MVP) architecture works best when developing GWT apps for two main reasons. First the MVP model, much like other design patterns, decouples development in a way that allows multiple developers to work simultaneously. Secondly, this model allows us to minimize our use of GWTTestCase and, for the bulk of our code, write lightweight (and fast) JRE tests.

London, England (CNN) -- Facebook this week announced a new way to express your interests -- a "Like" button that's set to appear all around the web. Click the button, and the Web page is shared with your friends.
What's more, every "Like" you submit ensures Facebook (and its partner sites) can deliver a more personalized experience to you.
It's a simple yet powerful feature -- one that delivers a significant blow to rival Twitter. Once the network effects take hold, it's frankly hard to imagine how any company could unseat Facebook's social networking dominance in the months to come. Without a counterattack, even Google may one day be dethroned.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.