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Just because computing is done in the cloud, that doesn't mean it has to be insecure and subject to outages. Or so says the U.S. Defense Department who just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel. Originally launched a year ago, the platform, called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment), was initially used for the testing and development of new applications. Now, the military says RACE is ready to go live...complete with 99.999% uptime - the same as their regular computing environment. Take that, Google!

Google is giving free Google Voice accounts to active U.S. service members who have a .mil email address. While we are still waiting for Google to finally open up its telephony service to all users, Google today announced that it will make Google Voice accounts available to military personnel. Staying in touch with family and loved ones is obviously quite hard for anybody who is serving overseas. Yet, with the help of Google Voice, family and friends of U.S. service members will be able to use a single number to get in touch with their loved ones. Members of the U.S. military will be able to receive calls and retrieve voice mails, no matter where in the world they are - as long as they have some form of Internet access and a U.S. phone number.

For many branches of the U.S. military, it's the year to bring Web 2.0 inside the war room. Flagship experiments in many a division are using open source wiki software like MediaWiki and MindTouch.

In both free and paid deployments, these collaborative networks are proving to be a favorite testing ground for a new way to manage the knowledge of soldiers. In some ways, these rigidly hierarchical organizations are displaying an real willingness to experiment, compared to the civilian businesses declaring themselves enterprise 2.0.

The intelligence community is inputting data to the Web at an amazing rate. That mountain of data can be overwhelming to mere humans who are trying to read through pages and pages of information to pinpoint exactly what they're after. Mark Rutherford of CNET News reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has hired a tech company to develop a reader that will scour the Web and render certain information and knowledge into a form that is more easily digested and usable.

The United States Army has more than 700,000 desktops that currently run on Windows XP operating systems and use Office 2003 software. Despite a Windows 7 release just around the corner and rumblings about Office 2010, the Army announced that it will upgrade to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 by the end of this year. Large corporations and government agencies are typically slow to adopt new technologies and software, mostly because of security, hardware and training issues.

iLink, a social network analytics technology from SRI International has recently been integrated into three online communities used by the military: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. The iLink technology improves the way the military community members share critical information across several different interest areas - from battlefield problem solving to supporting military families. Here, we take a look at the technology the military is using and how it can impact the future of social networking.