Google’s Cloud Platform tools are now available on GitHub. The move to GitHub will make it easier for developers already using GitHub to get started with Google’s various Cloud Platform offerings.

Thus far most of the repositories in Google’s GitHub account consist of code samples and projects related to offerings like App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage.

The Google Open Source Blog says that most of Google Cloud Platform’s existing open source tools will be migrated to the new GitHub organization “over time.”

For now though you can get started building apps on Google Cloud Platform just by forking one of the demo repositories and tweaking the code to fit your project. Sample apps like the guestbook demos for Python and Java, along with the OAuth 2 helper apps, make a good place to start if you’ve never built anything on Google’s cloud platform before.

Google has marked the launch of Google Drive by giving Gmail users an extra 2.3GB or so of storage. The company announced that it'll bump the free allowance up to 10GB (and counting) for free users, and 25GB for paying Google Drive customers, a substantial increase from the previous 7.7GB or so previously offered.

There are plenty of third-party Google Drive apps which can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. These apps, running in Google Chrome, are operating on the online files, and can be used to edit images and videos, fax and sign documents, manage projects, create flowcharts, etc

The developer who previously brought us the Facebook Friend Exporter, Mohamed Mansour, has created a new, experimental Google Chrome extension which adds text-based document collaboration capabilities to Google+ Hangouts. For those of you not yet versed in all the G+ terminology, Hangouts are the multi-person video chat feature in Google’s social networking service, supporting up to 10 people at a time.

With this new Hangout extension, now you can do more than simply chat – you can collaborate on text-based files, too. Mansour suggests this would be a great extension for developers to use for code collaboration, for example.

The extension was developed without access to an official Google+ API (application programming interface), since such a thing does not yet exist. In other words, like all Google+ Chrome extensions to date, it’s an unsanctioned hack.

It is also quite awesome and available here.

In order for other Hangout participants to share code with you, they, too, will need to install the extension.

...and counting. The Google Plus social network was launched less than a month ago with an invite only process. And now the network has grown so large that almost every person you know is on the network, with the exception of a few who didn’t get invited.

Since June 28th, the Google Plus social network has had over 20 million connections, making it one of the fastest growing social networks. The numbers were calculated by ComScore which is a well-known firm when it comes to crunching stats and other analytical info.

It must however be noted that Google Plus poses no threat to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but if Google Plus maintains this run and also opens the social network for everyone, the prominent social networks might have something to worry about. There’s a long way till G+ would reach Facebook’s number which has around 750 million users. It would be too early to say that users from Facebook and Twitter are switching to G+ since this is still in its initial stages. And of course, the number of users in a social network tells only half of the story.

ComScore merely tells the number of activations on Google Plus and doesn’t shed light on the active users on the social network. Facebook takes the cake with that one, since most users on the network are actively engaging themselves in conversations, chats and other activities with their friends. Facebook has also introduced video chat which will raise the stakes considerably, though Google Hangouts will let users have video chats with up to 10 people simultaneously.

Google yesterday unleashed the full details on the public launch of the Chrome OS notebooks – or what the company now calls Chromebooks.

It's the big push by Google to run the desktop and laptop world with the idea to take away market share from Microsoft by relieving users and support staff of "torture" from Windows.

"With Microsoft, and other operating system vendors, I think the complexity of managing your computer is really torturing users," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, quoted by Network World. "It's torturing everyone in this room. It's a flawed model fundamentally. Chromebooks are a new model that doesn't put the burden of managing the computer on yourself."

The key to Chrome OS is in its simplicity to the user. The data storage, applications, and even system updates are all done by Google in the cloud. In theory, this should free IT from having to deal with lost data, backups and outdated software.

Google claims that 75 percent of business users can be converted from Windows to Chrome OS right away.

In fact, inside Google, Brin estimated that only about 20 percent of its employees still use Windows. The rest of the staff either run Mac OS X or a flavor of Linux.

As far as Windows goes, however, Brin doesn't have any issue with the latest version – just that it doesn't operate like Chrome OS.

"I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Windows," Brin said. "Windows 7 has some great security features."

Google Docs users can this week upload videos up to 1GB in a supported format and make them available for viewing on Google Docs.

This means that rather than having to download a video and watch it in a separate player, users can stream a video within their browsers, provided they have Flash player installed on their devices.

Once a video has been uploaded, all that's required is a click on the file from the Documents list and the video will start streaming in the Google Docs Video Player.

Processing time may be excessive, Google engineers have said.

"(Videos) may take some time to process before they are available for viewing," software engineer Patrick Lacz said in the Google Docs Blog.

"Furthermore", he warned, "some videos uploaded last year have yet to be processed for viewing."

Hollywood is going after advertising companies who help fund pirate websites, and has now won a landmark victory.

Two Hollywood studios, Disney and Warner Brothers won 400,000 dollars in damages in a legal settlement case with Triton Media for contributory copyright infringement and inducement to infringe.

Triton was placing advertising services for a number of sites including free-tv-video-online.info, supernovatube.com and watch-movies.net that stream or link to unlicensed content. A Federal judge also barred Triton from deal with the sites.

The case follows an earlier victory for Hollywood against Supernovatube's operator Mohy Mir. Mir now describes himself as a self-employed SEO consultant. Triton's business is historically radio advertising.

The question, asks the Hollywood Reporter, is: "Does the MPAA have the stomach to pick a fight with the elephants in the room or will it aim to pick the cherries of low-hanging fruit from companies like Triton?" And the biggest elephant in the room is Google.

Google has explained how it intends to print from its browser-obsessed Chrome OS netbooks. Naturally, it will send all your jobs across the net, through its servers, and back down to a PC elsewhere in the room.

In fact, Google intends to send all your print jobs through its servers, whether they're coming from a desktop or a mobile or some other notebook that has nothing to do with Chrome OS. Well, through its servers or - in theory - someone else's.

The company has open sourced the code for its online print service, hoping to encourage other outfits to duplicate this contraption that takes print jobs across the world and back again.

We would argue it would be easier to create a common protocol that lets any machine talk to any printer. But Google likes it when stuff goes through its servers. It likes it a lot.

When Google released some early Chrome OS code last fall, company bigwigs hinted that some sort of newfangled printing contraption was on the way. And now, with a post to the official Chromium blog, Mountain View has explained at least a little of its thinking, while announcing that code and documentation for the setup are now available as part of the open source Chromium and Chromium OS projects.

The fledging Chrome OS - not due for official release on netbooks until the end of the year - puts all applications and data inside the browser, and Google has no intention of building and bundling print drivers.

"While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices," the company says.

"Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system - from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices - simply isn't feasible."

Instead, the company is designing an online service dubbed - predictably - Google Cloud Print. "Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today," Google says.

"Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app."

The service is meant for use not only with the web apps running on Chrome OS, but any breed of desktop or mobile app as well.

Some web-based apps will be pre-built to tap directly into the service - with no involvement from the Chrome OS - but if you're using another app, it will print by way of the browser.