It’s official. Google has landed on mars. According to Garett Rogers over at ZDNet, the CNAME record for mars.google.com was active so he decided to investigate a little bit and found: google.com/mars. Sure enough, this site reveals a Google Maps application for exploring the surface of Mars.

Much like the standard Maps application, there are three viewing options for exploring Mars: “Elevation,” “Visible,” and “Infrared.” The color that is available on portions of the map is absolutely brilliant and although there’s not an incredible amount more to discover on Mars than, say, on the moon - there’s enough to keep yourself occupied for your first 15 minutes at work.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re forced to turn the Fans of Tech Weblog into a Google-only news blog. No! We can’t! We won’t! Ahem…sorry.

Regardless, it appears as though the Web 2.0 online word processing app I’ve been overlooking for the past few months has been acquired by the big G. Offering everything that a standard, downloadable word processor might, Writely goes the extra mile by adding collaboration on a document and RSS feeds for each document.

With this addition to Google’s army of services, though, it is painfully clear that an online office suite is coming. First, they offer a fast, simple, feature-rich Webmail application (Gmail). Then, they’ve gone on to add Gmail for Domains and Google Page Creator and are about to add an as well as an online data storage service.

Now, back to the original story. Writely has certainly proven its’ worth over the past hour for me and I have no doubt I’ll be using it more. Fortunately, I was one of the first to sign up for a BETA. Unfortunately, the BETA is closed off temporarily while they make the move to Google.

Now, with any luck, these new Writely docs of mine might eventually become a search result from within Gmail.

Microsoft unveiled the BETA version of their new-and-improved search engine (didn’t they do that in 2005…and 2004…and 2003?) at LIVE.COM.  This is the engine that they recently claimed would wind up being better and more useful than Google.  Then they took that back.  Regardless, I’m thoroughly impressed with the new Live.com start page as well as the search features.  The zoom in/zoom out features of both the text and image search functions are excellent and I’m highly tempted to begin using this image search as my default.  Also, the “Gadgets” for Live.com are slowly starting to evolve into something useful although some functionality is missing.  Where, you ask?  It’s not in Firefox.  It’s in Internet Explorer 7.

After years (literally) of waiting, AOL has finally decided to open up it’s instant messaging protocol to developers. Bottom line: programs like Trillian, GAIM, and Miranda IM are finally able to OFFICIALLY offer the AIM protocol with their client application. According to an article at Neowin, the announcement was quite unexpected as a message from an AOL IM developer posted a message on the Neowin forums.

From AOL, “Today is a historic day at AOL as we annouced, just moments ago, a software development kit for AOL Instant Messenger. Open AIM will empower you, as the developer, to write custom clients, plugins, and eventually bots. When you include this SDK with the web presence API and AIM Model-T (IAmAlpha, or AIM Modules) we are really starting to build compelling social development tools. The SDK will be available starting at 5AM EST today at developer.aim.com.”