Google has long been known to spare no expense when it comes to perks for employees. Looks like the slowdown in ad revenue is having an impact on Google, and the company is looking for ways to trim costs. In addition to staff reductions, Google is also cutting back on Googlers’ 20% time on pet projects and has reduced the availability of its free cafeterias.

The Wall Street Journal posted an extended story today on what Google is doing to curtail costs in light of the current economic climate. The laundry list is very long. It includes:

• Running ads in services it previously provided ad-free.
• Shifting engineers from pet projects to those that are more likely to succeed.
• Cutting back the number of hours its cafeterias are open.
• No more afternoon tea for Google’s NYC office.
• Killing off services that aren’t succeeding.
• Office closures.
• Merging overlapping services into one unit.
• Slowing down the rate of hiring new staff.
• Reducing current staff levels by up to 10,000 people.
• Delaying the production of new data facilities.

What I think is most significant is the way Google is going to manage its engineers. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told The Journal that it is shifting its engineering and sales resources to areas and projects that show promise, and reducing the number of engineers working on projects with less promise.

This represents a pretty big change in Google’s thinking. It has always offered Google employees the opportunity to work on projects and services that they wanted to for 20 percent of their time. Google didn’t say that it was taking away that 20 percent, but it is going to manage it differently.

SearchMash has already been killed off by Google, and Lively will be shut down at the end of this month. Other services on the brink of elimination include Google Notebook (which I use and happen to like) and Google Audio Indexing. If there are any other services that Google might pull the plug on, they haven’t yet been named.

In all, Google is taking the economy seriously and making the appropriate shifts in its business practices to meet these uncertain times.

If you’re a user of the Google Desktop product on the Windows platform, Google has good news for you. It’s finally added a Gmail gadget for the Desktop sidebar. Now you can see incoming e-mail without opening up Gmail in your browser.

I find Google Desktop to be very useful in Windows. The fact that a Gmail gadget hasn’t been available before now has been rather baffling. Thank goodness Google finally listened to the pleas of the masses and added one.

Google says:

“You’ll see that it covers the basics such as reading, searching, and sending messages. You can star messages, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and we didn’t forget about contact auto-complete. It doesn’t take up much space in your sidebar or desktop, and you can also resize it to show as few or as many messages as you’d like.”

Right now the Gmail gadget currently works with the latest release of Google Desktop for Windows. Support for Macs and Linux isn’t available yet. I haven’t have a chance to download it yet, but Google is excited that people check it out and provide some feedback.

Google on Wednesday released a new version of its Chrome browser, the third Chrome beta release.

Chrome users can expect an automatic update soon.

Version 0.3.154.9 fixes a security issue that allowed address spoofing in pop-up windows:

“The window’s address bar could be manipulated to show a different address than the actual origin of the content,”

– Mark Larson
Google Chrome program manager
Source: blog post

Version 0.3.154.9 also enables laptop touchpad scrolling, improves plug-in and proxy performance and reliability, fixes a PDF crash generated by closing a tab, and eliminates the storage of data from secure sites.

The updated Chrome also has benefited from some housekeeping and interface changes. The menu commands “New incognito window” and “New window” now always open new windows, privacy protected and normal, respectively. The spell checker now works on text input fields and allows users to add words to the spell check dictionary, and file downloading has been changed to make it more secure.

Chrome is currently a distant fourth in terms of market share. According to Net Applications, the global browser market-share breakdown, as of October 30, is as follows:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (71.52%)
• Mozilla Firefox (19.46%)
• Apple Safari (6.65%)
• Google Chrome (0.78%)
• Opera (0.69%)

Chrome is currently available for Windows XP and Vista; Google plans to release a Mac version in the near future.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt must have new plans to attack the competition, or they just like to fly really, really fast. Whatever the reason, they recently bought a fighter jet.

Today, The New York Times is reporting that a company controlled by the top three Googlers recently bought a Dornier Alpha Fighter Jet. The company, H211 LLC, is controlled by Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, and it is responsible for managing a fleet of private aircraft for the three men.

The company already manages a Boeing 757, a Boeing 767, and two Gulfstream V’s. These four aircraft, plus the new fighter jet, all have landing rights at Moffett Field, which is a located near Google’s main offices.

According to a Google spokesperson, the Alpha Jet is being outfitted with scientific instruments for NASA missions, including instruments that the other planes could not carry.

The Times says that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is “an avid pilot.”

The Dornier Alpha Fighter Jet is made by Dornier in Germany and Dassault-Breguet of France.

Every so often Google adds something new to Google Labs, where it tests non final versions of software that may or may not become a standard feature.

The latest is called Mail Goggles — a play on “beer goggles” — that just might save your tail when it comes to e-mail.

Everyone has probably done it. Late at night, clouded by fatigue, you send an e-mail to someone that you later wish you could recall.

Heaven forbid you send an e-mail after consuming a few alcoholic beverages. That’s a recipe for disaster, and one that is all too easy to serve up given the proliferation of smartphones with mobile e-mail capabilities.

You surely remember the term “beer goggles” from when you were in college. You know, the more you drink, the more attractive you are likely to find someone of the opposite sex (even if they aren’t).

When you were on the prowl, you probably had a wingman or other friend who served as a filter to prevent you from making a mistake when you were wearing your beer goggles.

It’s in the spirit of protecting us from our inner e-mail demons that Google engineers brewed up Mail Goggles. Think of Mail Goggles as your new, electronic wingman.

According to The Official Gmail Blog:

“When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday e-mail. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend, as that is the time you’re most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it’s active in the General settings.”

Some people will either love this feature or hate it. For me, I love it. Not that I’m out on the prowl these days and need a wingman

In a blog post on The Official Google Blog, Google’s chief Internet evangelist lays out some thoughts on how the Internet will transform over the coming years. Essentially, he says that the Internet is a software artifact, and software provides for an endless frontier of possibilities.

“The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.”

Source: Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

He has some interesting thoughts about how the Internet will be used in the future — and what will be connected to it. It will not be restrained to just computers. I found Cert’s comments about how mobile devices will interact with the Internet most interesting.

He writes:

In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well–either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. “Where are my glasses?” you will ask. “You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room,” your mobile or laptop will say.

RFID tags have some shrinking to do before they’ll fit onto a set of keys or eyeglasses. There’s also a lot more at play than just the Internet in this scenario. Wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth and GPS, will be required. The important aspect is that they will all interact to share and retrieve information seamlessly.

This is already beginning to happen today.