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This week, Google gave the world the first major update on Chrome OS since the project was announced last year. While Google's operating system in the cloud won't be ready for prime-time for six months, Google initiated a pilot program that includes a brand new test notebook with Chrome OS installed. While many have been selected for the program and have already received their machine, many of you are still dying to get their hands on Google's latest project. Well, we have some good news!

Just over a year ago, Google announced that it was working on its own operating system, named "Google Chrome OS". Today, the company is finally unveiling its much-discussed OS alongside the Chrome Web Store, a marketplace for Web apps and browser extensions.

The announcement is being live streamed as we speak via Google's own YouTube service. You can watch it along with us after the jump and share your thoughts as we curate the best tidbits via #rwwchrome.

The end of Google Wave and rumors that the company is building a Facebook competitor has a lot of people talking about Google's need to get better at social. Fortune's article on Google's future growth last month, apart from highlighting absurdity a company becoming "too successful," speculates as to what Google will need to do in order to continue growing in the future. The article's authors dismiss Google Apps for Enterprise and move on to sexier fair, discussing what Google needs to do to be more "social." But it's clear that Google has big plans for the enterprise. First, of course, because Eric Schmidt has said so, but also because of the various steps the company is taking.

The battle between Facebook and Google just got even hotter with the news that the social network has hired Matthew Papakipos, the man who started and lead both the Google Chrome OS project and the Chrome WebGL GPU hardware project for hardware-accelerated graphics. Both projects "are in good shape," Papakipos said in a Tweet this morning, so he's leaving to join the project team at Facebook.

If the Chrome Operating System is going to be a major part of Google's plans for the future, and its strategy for staving off Facebook's potential domination of the internet experience for a billion people, then this hire is likely bad news for Google. Facebook, on the other hand, is putting together quite the team.

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks," began Apple CEO Steve Jobs at last night's D8 conference, trying to come up with an apt analogy for the recent changes we're seeing in the computing landscape of the new millennium. "But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them."

Jobs wasn't trying to disparage Microsoft. He was actually referring to the form factor of "personal computers" - laptops and desktops alike. It's a discussion about the upcoming era of computing where everything becomes radically different, from the form factor itself to the user interface and interactions that, combined, make up what we think of as "personal computing."

IBM is teaming up with eyeOS, the maker of an open-source, web-based operating system. We've had our (ahem) eye on eyeOS for quite some time. It's receiving renewed interest in the wake of the much anticipated launch of Google Chrome OS.

IBM will offer eyeOS 2.0, available in January, to all customers who buy IBM's System Z mainframe servers. SystemZ servers are used mainly by large organizations for data processing purposes. So eyeOS will be used as a desktop in the cloud for potentially thousands of enterprise users.

Noted security guru Bruce Schneier, chief technologist at BT, has scoffed at Google's claims about its new OS, just announced yesterday. According to the Google blog post, Chrome OS represents a complete redesign of the underlying security architecture of the OS "so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware, and security updates." A bold statement to say the least...and apparently one Schneier doesn't think too much of. "It's an idiotic claim," he says.

This morning the blogosphere is abuzz with the late-breaking news about Google's new Chrome OS, a combination of the Chrome browser and windowing system running on top of a Linux kernel. But more important than what's being announced is what hasn't been said. People already have a lot of questions about the Chrome OS and the answers may ultimately determine how well it succeeds as a true competitor to both Microsoft and Apple, as is being widely speculated. We'll explore some of those questions in this post.

Just after we heard a number of rumors about the possible arrival of the rumored Google OS tonight, Google actually went ahead and announced that it will indeed release its own operating system - the Google Chrome Operating System. For now, Google plans to aim this OS at the netbook market. The OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010, but Google promises that it will open-source the code later this year. According the the announcement on the Google blog, the OS will run on standard x86 chips as well as ARM chips, and Google is already working with a number of OEMs to bring devices that run the Google Chrome OS to the market.