Cool. Creepy. Google in your browser, in your email, in your phone, on your TV, in your car. 

I wonder at what point Google will start to face serious antitrust pressure from the Department of Justice. Would you bet on it? I would. It seems like it's just a matter of time now. Sometimes I wonder if their embrace of open source software is entirely genuine, or merely a strategic position to help mitigate antitrust pressure. I'm guessing it's probably a little bit of both, and I'm wondering if it will work.

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

For many people, their mobile phone—and access to the Internet—is always within reach. App Inventor for Android gives everyone, regardless of programming experience, the opportunity to control and reshape their communication experience. We’ve observed people take pride in becoming creators of mobile technology and not just consumers of it.

Pretty cool stuff. It's similar in many ways to what Palm did for webOS with Ares... only, you know, actually good.

Last year we launched Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing innovative web experiments built with open standards like JavaScript and HTML5. Today we’re pleased to announce that the site now points to 100 experiments -- each one made, hosted, and submitted by programmers from around the world.

This is awesome. I saw this a while ago but I didn't realize how much new content was being added. Someone should reach out to every single one of these 100 programmers and start a new distributed digital company. Wait a second... that's a good idea.

It's also 100 more reasons to get rid of Adobe Flash... as if the poor performance and stability wasn't enough.

Three posts about Google in a row? Well, why not. Plus, this is totally awesome.

Now go waste an hour playing this, as I did. Too bad there aren't multiple levels.

Honestly, I don't even remember owning a TV. It's like a distant memory. I haven't had a TV for over 4 years now, and I don't miss it. Anything I want I can get faster (and higher quality) either through Hulu, network/studio websites, or torrents as a last resort.

It will be neat of Google TV runs on the desktop like Boxee, but other than that I guess I'll be sitting this one out. I really have no desire to go back to $50+/mo fees and have to deal with commercials and "scheduled" programming. The only thing I miss is the comforting feeling of waking up at 3am and watching bad infomercials.

Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Well, this was unexpected. All the buzz about font-face, and then Google goes off and does something totally awesome like this. I definitely like the simplicity and scope of this over font-face. I just wish there were more open source fonts.

That happened a lot faster than I thought it would. It's awesome to see. My next phone isn't even going to be a phone. I'm going to wait until Google rolls Gizmo into Google Voice and then get rid of my cell phone for good and just use my phone over WiFi. And with the $1000 I'll save every year in cell phone service charges I can just buy a new device every year... and still end up saving money. Is it odd that I'm actually excited to get rid of my cell phone? I just don't see the need anymore, really. The only time I can make a clear call is when I'm at home or at work, or at a quiet coffee shop; and all of these places have WiFi.

Service areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.

A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we'll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.

Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we'll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We've been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.

Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.

Favorite Places: We're doing a second round of our Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

If you have a local retail business, I can almost guarnatee this is the best $25/mo you can spend.

HTML5 has the potential to capture the online video market from Flash by providing an open standard for web video — but only if everyone can agree on a codec. So far Adobe and Microsoft support H.264 because of the video quality, while Mozilla has been backing Ogg Theora because it's open source. Now it looks like Google might be able to end the squabble by making the VP8 codec it bought from On2 Technologies open source and giving everyone what they want: high-quality encoding that also happens to be open. Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?

If true, this would be awesome EPIC. I kind of suspected this might happen after the On2 acquisition. I figured that Google probably wanted to get away from the aging VP3 codec that YouTube was built on, and it just didn't make sense to pay the insane licensing costs for VP6—they could just buy On2—and then they did.

And while H.264 is great, it isn't the best for streaming (cost wise), especially when YouTube is serving over a billion videos per day. VP6 is, in many ways, superior. If VP8 is everything that On2 claims it is, it should be no contest.

One step closer to NEVER having to use Microsoft Office again. Hallelujah!

If they could just make the spreadsheet application a little more robust, or integrate it better with the Google Fusion Tables API, I'd never have to use Excel ever again. I'll take either one.