The dangerous thing about these attacks is that they're hosted on a google.com domain, which gives these nefarious pages an air of legitimacy. One form even had the researchers themselves stumped as to whether it was phishing or not!

While researching the many examples of Docs-hosted phishing sites, the F-Secure researchers came across this form (see below), which asks for your Google Voice number, email address and the secret PIN code on your account. It appears to be a phishing site, but oddly, at least one Google employee was found to have linked to the form on online Help forums.

This stumped the researchers, who then turned to Twitter to ask their followers what they thought. Tweets Mikko H. Hypponen, F-Secure's CRO:

"The consensus on Twitter seems to be that the weird page on google.com is a phishing site. The jury's still out though."

Writes one commenter on the original blog post: "I must say kudos to Google for anonymizing so well the form, there's no way to tell who made it." Uh-oh, Google.

As of now, it's still unknown whether this form is a phishing attack or a real form used by Google in the past. If you want to try to figure it out on your own, the F-Secure blog post provides a link to the form. We won't link to it ourselves, as a precaution.

Update: The following was just added to the F-Secure website:

Updated to add: We got contacted by a Google employee.

They informed us that, surprisingly, the questionable page is indeed the official Google form to request Google Voice account transfer. They also told us to remove all references to the form in this blog post. But I'm afraid we can't do that.

Image credits: F-Secure

With Microsoft's initiatives in the area of HTML5 (the next major revision of the Web's core markup language), including its HTML5-enabled version of Bing search, and updates to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Web browser, it wouldn't be surprising to hear that Microsoft is indeed working on an HTML5-enabled Hotmail Web application, too. But will Microsoft actually release it before Google does the same for Gmail? That could make things interesting.

In February 2010, Google announced it was shifting all its Google Gears-related efforts to HTML5. Gears, an internally built Web browser plugin, brought offline storage capabilities to a number of Google services, including Gmail, Docs, YouTube, Reader and others. In April 2010, Google announced it would discontinue offline access in Google Docs provided by Gears in favor of HTML5. The transition would be "temporary" Google said. In December, Google announced Docs would have finally HTML5-enabled offline storage once again in "early 2011."

It is now April 2011, and there is still no offline functionality in either Gmail or Docs. According to a post from a Google employee at the beginning of this month on an official Google support forum, the company says it mis-estimated the timeline for the change in Docs.

"Hi all,

We're sorry we mis-estimated the timeline for when we'd have offline functionality again. While we try to provide accurate information around when features will be released, in some instances we can be wrong in guessing how long it'll take to build something. Morever, it's more important for us to launch with as few bugs as possible, which can only happen after much testing and iteration.

Rest assured that our engineering team is working hard to bring offline back. Hope you'll stick around and be patient with us for a bit longer."

Small Advances in HTML5 via Mobile and More

That's not to say HTML5 developments have stalled at Google. It has rolled out HTML5-enabled mobile apps, select features and notifications for Gmail, plus HTML5-enabled cloud printing support for mobile users of Docs. It has just not launched offline storage yet.

Meanwhile, although Microsoft never offered any form of offline storage for Hotmail, it has been publicly touting its HTML5 advances recently, including an HTML5 version of Bing search, an HTML5-enabled smartphone experience and HTML5 support in IE9.

Of course, Microsoft's version of HTML5 support for IE may not be the same one the rest of the online community believes in, as ZDNet points out, referencing Firefox's Mike Beltzner's comment skewering Microsoft for Microsoft for describing HTML5 as a "native experience" that works best on Windows. (Oh Microsoft, will you never learn?)

That said, Microsoft at least seems to be making more noise about the HTML5 Web standard in its products these days, while Google is now on record saying it goofed on the timeline for bringing HTML5 to one of its Web services.

With that in mind, let's declare the race to bring us HTML5-enabled offline storage to webmail officially on. Anyone want to take bets on who gets there first?

The file uploader isn't really a ground-breaking new feature - after all, plenty of sites today are offering drag-and-drop uploads - if anything, it's a long overdue upgrade for the Google Docs service. However, it comes at an important time for Google as it continues to compete with Microsoft Office, one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows to this day.

Microsoft arrived late to the Web Office game, introducing its own online suite in July. Microsoft is also deeply integrating its Office Web Apps into Facebook, we discovered last week, and it will also be integrated with Facebook's newly announced messaging platform. Facebook and Google, although seemingly dissimilar services, are actually two of the biggest rivals in the Internet industry today. Facebook has been poaching top Google engineers left-and-right and is attempting to "out-Google" Google by organizing the Internet through social relationships and "likes" instead of algorithms and analyzing links, as Google does. If successful, Facebook could not only cut deeply into Google's advertising business, but could become people's default search portal, too. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft's Bing search engine, which is integrated with Facebook's search. (Microsoft's $240 million 2007 investment in Facebook doesn't look so crazy now, does it?)

Two days ago, Google unveiled a counterattack against Microsoft's stalwart suite. It launched a service called "Google Cloud Connect" that allows people still using Office to take advantage of Google Docs' Web-based collaboration features within Office. The product arose from Google's acquisition of DocVerse from earlier this year. With Cloud Connect, files created in Microsoft Office are synced to Google's "cloud" but can still be used in Office for editing purposes.

The goal, of course, is not to improve life for Office users, necessarily, but to make the transition from the desktop to the cloud easier and less cumbersome.

Drag-and-drop is just another example of this ongoing push to get people to leave Office behind.

Google also announced another minor feature today which allows you to hide the title bar above the document editor by choosing either View -> Compact controls or pressing Ctrl Shift F (Cmd Shift F on Macs).

Google describes the former of these as equivalent to having an unlisted number - where anyone with the correct URL to a document can view it, but it won't be searchable on Google. The latter option makes the document fully public, and puts the URL in the "phonebook," which means anyone could stumble onto the document through a Google search.

Visibility options are now clearly displayed next to each document on the Google Docs homepage, and users can make bulk changes to many documents at once in their settings. Additionally, users can create a customized URL for their docs to make sharing faster and easier to understand than a jumbled stream of letters and numbers.

These new sharing features, coupled with the addition of Wave-like real-time collaboration and chat continue to push Google Docs to the forefront of online document editing solutions. Microsoft may be slowly catching up by offering Web-based versions of Word, Excel and other Office products, but Google's simplicity, ease of use and Web-native functionality maintain its position as the better choice at the moment.

Among the three tools in Docs, the Word web app comes the closest to fulfilling its promises. While it isn't ready for managing highly complex documents, it's more than sufficient for editing standard text documents collaboratively.

The Word web app includes all the basic editing features one would expect from a stripped-down version of Word, but you can't add footnotes, for example, or insert tables from your Excel files. Thankfully, though, Word will not strip any of these features out of the file. Once you download the file or open it up in Word, your footnotes and will reappear.

This ability of Word to keep a document's formatting shows that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support these features in the web app.

Excel Web App

Among all of the apps, the Excel app is the most basic of the three apps included in the suite. It can only read documents in Microsoft's Office 2007 format, for example, while all the other tools also support older formats. That, by itself, could be a show-stopper for some users, but the most egregious omission here is that there is no graphical interface for entering a formula. Instead, you have to type every formula by hand, which is a slow and error-prone process.

The good news, though, is that the Excel web app can read all the formulas in imported files. It's clear, though, that the app is only really meant for editing existing documents and not for creating new ones.

PowerPoint Web App

The PowerPoint web app did a nice job at opening every PowerPoint file we threw at it. When it comes to editing, however, the app is also very stripped down. You can use it to create a basic outline of your presentation or change the order of your slieds, for example, but you can't add floating images, backgrounds and resize text and image fields. You can, however, add and edit SmartArt clips.

Bugs

While the whole office suite ran very well in all the browsers we tested (except for Safari on the iPad, which displayed the documents just fine but crashed when we tried to edit), Microsoft still has to fix before Docs can become a run-away hit. While Docs has no issues importing most Microsoft Office documents, editing uploaded documents can be tricky. If you set Microsoft Office on the desktop to track the changes you make to a document, for example, the web apps will refuse to let you edit the document. We also ran unto issues with image uploads, which, at times, didn't finish. Docs also often complained that the images we tried to upload were not compatible with Docs, even though they were just standard JPEGs.

Verdict

Microsoft clearly wants users to see Docs as an addition to the traditional Microsoft Office desktop suite and not as a replacement for Office. After using Docs for a while it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of the limitations Microsoft imposed are not due to the fact that Docs runs in the browser, but simply due to the fact that Microsoft didn't want to include them.

While Microsoft is partnering with Facebook on this project, Docs feels like it is stuck between two worlds: the new reality of how people collaborate and share content online - and Microsoft's intent to preserve its old revenue streams for as long as possible.

To some degree, Docs feels similar to Apple's office suite for the iPad. While Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are sufficient for most basic tasks and hold a lot of promise, users with more than the most basic needs will come away frustrated.

ReadWriteWeb first wrote about Google Product Ideas in late 2008. At the time the site was focused on collecting mobile ideas. Today Google is offering users a chance to submit on a variety of products. Within each sub-site users can view the top voted suggestions, the most popular concepts, the newest submissions and the ideas that have been "answered" or acted upon. While Google Reader's Answered Ideas page is currently blank, it will be interesting to track what the team chooses to work on and why.

To submit your product ideas visit the main Product Ideas page.

As covered by ReadWriteWeb, Twittergate is one example of how Google may be left open to security breaches. The documents stolen from Twitter were Google Docs, and because they were not hosted behind a firewall, Twitter's business plan was more easily obtained. In this case, as with most cases, human error and insecure passwords are to blame. In order to use Google services, the LAPD would have to be particularly cautious to back up their records and follow password protocol.

Google's "Going Google" campaign recently launched to encourage businesses to switch to Google Apps in the workplace. 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations are currently using Google Apps in the office, including Motorola, University of Notre Dame and the Mercy Corps. For many businesses considering the service, security still remains the biggest question.

Thanks to Eric for the tip!

Now, you can. Thanks to Google Labs.

But what if you're simply inspired by the email and not its contents? Create a Document can help you there, too. Once the feature and keyboard shortcuts are enabled, you gain the ability to start a new blank Doc directly from Gmail. Simply, hit the G and W keys at the same time and you'll have a new blank document. Ta dah!

Now, granted, this may not seem like a huge leap forward in technology. But it does mark yet another step that enhances the interoperability among the Google offerings. And that provides a glimmer of hope - and a reason to seriously consider Google's suite of tools - especially for those of us who constantly bemoan the lacking interoperability among the components of other more popular office productivity suites.

At the very least, it makes more sense than Google Mail Goggles.

To try the new feature, log into Gmail and then visit Google Labs to enable Create a Document.

Wouldn't it be great if you could keep an eye on your other Google apps - like Calendar and Docs - without having to open multiple tabs or traverse from window to window? Now, thanks to the latest feature releases from Google Labs, you can. Introducing Google Labs Calendar and Doc gadgets for Gmail.

While the real estate is constrained, the view manages to provide just enough detail, giving you access to upcoming meetings and appointments and a glimpse of the latest documents on file.

But you can do more than just view the contents. The Docs gadget allows you to search your documents, and both gadgets enable you to create new items on the fly. The Calendar gadget also gives you the option to have a "mini calendar" present for reference.

To test drive these gadgets for yourself, simply head over to Labs and enable the Calendar gadget and the Docs gadget. Save your new settings and switch back to your Gmail interface. Now, you'll see two new collapsible areas below Labels that give you a view into your Calendar and your Docs.

Labs Holds the Key to Future Gmail Features

The rate of innovation coming out of Labs seems to be on the upswing. Lately, we've seen a steady stream of Google Labs features for Gmail, like Labels enhancements, Mail Goggles, and Canned Responses. And they're beginning to answer very real workflow issues - okay maybe not with Goggles - that enhance the functionality of Gmail and make it a more competitive platform.

It will be interesting to see what users choose to install and adopt from Labs - and equally interesting what they choose to ignore - because that will determine what Google decides to bake into future features of Gmail, itself.

I think it's safe to assume that these two latest gadgets from Labs are leading candidates for core Gmail functionality, especially given how simply and effectively they combine access to the most popular Google apps in the place where most users live and breathe - their inbox.