You might not have liked all that change. I know I found it jarring, to put it nicely — and I still bristle at some of the things I liked better the old way (gahhh, Google Reader).

In fact, a major overhaul is something Google’s designers had wanted to do for a long time and had previously failed to persuade the company to do, they said on a panel at SXSW today.

In 2007, designers from multiple Google products put together a set of unified redesign proposals code-named Kanna (Icelandic, meaning to explore, examine or investigate) that was never released.

Among other reasons, the designers think Kanna failed because they presented then-CEO Eric Schmidt and other leaders with a set of four different concepts, with themes like making Google more like desktop clients, or differentiating products by color. It sounded like there were too many options and not enough conviction.

(Above is a picture that shows a thumbnail of one of the Kanna designs. I’ll add the full screenshots if I can get them.)

By contrast, the 2011 project went from some slides to release in a period of a few months, in part because Google’s designers — who are embedded in product teams across the company — have become more strategic about how they manage their roles.

Here’s the basic chain of events. In January 2011, Larry Page IM’ed a couple of people at Google’s internal Creative Lab, asking for some ideas for a company-wide redesign, said Creative Lab member Chris Wiggins. The group quickly put together a “straw man” presentation, printing out before-and-after slides on paper.

“This time was different because the world had a changed a lot, and Google had changed a lot, and design across the industry was ratcheting up,” Wiggins said.

On April 1, Page became CEO and told the team the redesign was approved, and that he wanted it released before the end of summer.

The redesign project was code-named Kennedy, for JFK’s mandate in 1961 for the U.S. to figure out a way to get to the moon before the end of the decade.

Divisions across the company accelerated to a sprint, with Google+, for instance, completely overhauling its design before its launch on June 30.

Members of the design team — including Wiggins, Jon Wiley of Google Search, Nicholas Jitkoff of Google Chrome, Michael Leggett of Gmail and Evelyn Kim of Google Maps — went into detail at SXSW today about how they got everyone on board.

They said they often used the justification “because Larry says so” to push things through, joking that they tried to get him to sign a Post-it note so they could re-use his approval.

More seriously, they built live internal prototypes for Google’s engineers so that people across the company could more easily include the new style, navigation and UI elements in their own products.

They conducted qualitative and quantitative user testing and released internal versions that generated lots of criticism. (The above image is from employee complaints after a release of redesigned Gmail. See, at first Google people hated it, too!)

And so, the redesign was a success story, at least from a company politics point of view. I would say the jury’s still out on whether the redesign is good, though obviously it makes sense for Google to try to make its products more consistent.

The Google designers said today that the new design was still being modified — for instance, a hover-over product menu has been pulled back — and there are many projects that are as yet uncompleted, like the creation of a Google-specific font.

And yes, they know how we hate the huge new font size and massive spacing in Gmail — but that, they said, was a purposeful decision to make the product readable by the largest possible audience.

RELATED POSTS:

• The Homeless Defend Becoming Hotspots
• Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way
• The Best and Weirdest Requests and Errands at SXSW From Zaarly, TaskRabbit and Others
• Al Gore and Sean Parker Blame TV and Money for Ruining Politics, and Say Social Media Ought to Fix It
• Letters From SXSW: How to Be “Disruptive”
• SXSW News: Jerry Levin’s StartUp Health Academy for Entrepreneurs Announces First Class
• The Best (And Worst) Marketing Gimmick in Austin
• Forget Cleantech — It’s Cleanweb at SXSW
• Houston Comes to Austin as Kara Swisher Talks Lessons Learned with Dropbox CEO
• After Nearly Doubling Its Userbase in Three Months, Instagram Will Finally Come to Android
• The Power of Power at South By Southwest
• How Jimmy Fallon Uses the Nike FuelBand (It’s Naughty, Of Course)
• Gawker Will Deputize Commenters, Says Sheriff Nick Denton
• Microsoft’s Danah Boyd: Social Media Makes the World More Fearful
• Etsy CEO on Building a Lean Start-Up: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy
• South By Southwest Parties On, Despite the Rain
• At SXSW, Joi Ito Invites Tech Entrepreneurs Into the MIT Media Lab
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry Drops In on South By Southwest
• Can Playing More Games Make Your Life “SuperBetter”? Jane McGonigal Thinks So.
• Google’s Vic Gundotra on Why Plus Isn’t a Minus
• Rain Douses Austin as Crowds Flood Into SXSW
• Checking In and Checking Out South by Southwest
• SXSW Serendipity Gets Yet Another Helper: Kismet
• The Essential SXSW Tech Tool Kit
• Geek in the Heart of Texas: AllThingsD at SXSW 2012

“Until now, users of Google’s many products could use different products in different ways, expecting that information they provide for one product, such as YouTube, would not be synthesized with information they provide for another product, such as Gmail and Maps,” the AGs wrote. “The new policy forces these consumers to allow information across all of these products to be shared, without giving them the proper ability to opt out.”

A harsh indictment of the privacy policy changes, which are due to go into effect on March 1. And the AGs didn’t stop there. They went on to question Google’s motives for adjusting its policy and raise an eyebrow over the company’s history of altruistic posturing over privacy.

“We … are also concerned that Google’s new privacy policy goes against a respect for privacy that Google has carefully cultivated as a way to attract consumers. Google boasts that it puts a premium on offering users ‘meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information,’ developing its products and services in ways that prevent personal information from being ‘held hostage.’ It has made these and other privacy-respecting representations repeatedly over the years, and many consumers have chosen to use Google products over other products because of these representations. Now these same consumers are having their personal information ‘held hostage’ within the Google ecosystem.”

The implication here is clear: Google has been less than forthright in its representations about privacy, and the public needs more assurances about how their personal information is shared across its services.

Google for its part continues to defend its plans, insisting these new privacy settings are in everyone’s best interests.

“Our updated Privacy Policy will make our privacy practices easier to understand, and it reflects our desire to create a seamless experience for our signed-in users,” a company spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We’ve undertaken the most extensive notification effort in Google’s history, and we’re continuing to offer choice and control over how people use our services services. Of course we are happy to discuss this approach with regulators globally.”

Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra said in a blog post today that Rapportive would continue to be available for Gmail users as a plugin that overlays information about their contacts inside their inbox, as it is today.

Rapportive has drawn many passionate users — it hadn’t disclosed how many — who were worried that it might be shut down, given the tendency by top tech companies to “acqhire” small teams for their talent but not their products.

Vohra said today, “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.” Rapportive users will now be covered by LinkedIn’s terms of service and privacy policy.

LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash, beating out other potential acquirers such as Twitter, sources said. As of Feb. 7, when we first wrote about it, the deal had not closed but was well on its way.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

LinkedIn declined to comment, while Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra ducked our attempts to talk to him.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash. The deal has not officially closed yet.

Rapportive, which is still available only for Gmail, overlays an email correspondent’s social networking accounts alongside open messages and drafts. So, for instance, you can see a person’s most recent tweet and mention it in your email to them. Or you can realize that you’re not connected on LinkedIn to a person you just had a meeting with, and rectify that.

Rapportive hasn’t publicly disclosed how many people use it, but in September, Vohra was quoted as saying Rapportive users viewed more than 65 million contacts per month. He also said at the time that the company was preparing to sell premium products.

Competitors to Rapportive include Xobni (our coverage) and Mingly (our coverage). LinkedIn also bought a somewhat similar contact management start-up called Connected last fall.

Last spring, Google introduced its own competing “People Widget” for Gmail, which Rapportive then integrated with its own product.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

House lawmakers met with Google Deputy General Counsel Mike Yang and Public Policy Director Pablo Chavez Thursday to discuss new policy that unifies 60 of Google’s services under a single user agreement and grants the company greater license to share user account information between them.

But the closed-door session ended well short of resolution, with at least a few members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that presided over it openly criticizing Google’s explanation for the privacy changes.

“[They] danced around actual details, and instead spoke in generalities, highlighting their efforts to ‘enhance the user experience’,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. was equally critical.

“At the end of the day, ultimately, I don’t think that their answers to us were very forthcoming necessarily in what this really means for the safety of our families and our children and ourselves,” Mack said.

To be fair, Yang and Chavez reportedly did provide a thorough walkthrough of Google’s new privacy settings. But that wasn’t quite what the subcommittee was looking for. What lawmakers really want to understand is how easy or difficult it is for users to protect their privacy and control how their personal information is shared across Google’s services.

“Consumers want to know if they hit the delete button, that something truly is deleted,” said Bono Mack. “The concern is that if I’m logged into Gmail and then forget to log out when I then go to search for information about cervical cancer, my data can then be transported to YouTube. Does that mean my health information is at risk?”

A fair question, and evidently one that’s going to take a few more hearings to get an answer to.

Organizing your inbox might sound tempting. The Radicati Group reports that the average employee spends about 25 percent of their day on email; by 2013, approximately 507 billion email messages will be sent each day. Many people dream of hyperproductive days unhampered by junk mail, forwards and unimportant exchanges. We’re envious of (and slightly annoyed by) friends who accomplish that “inbox zero” feat (and then post about it on Facebook or Twitter — you know who you are).

But before you get obsessive-compulsive about color-coding and labeling emails, keep in mind that over-organizing doesn’t necessarily solve your email problems. In fact, you’ll likely remember less of the information that’s in the emails if you do that.

A study conducted last year by IBM Research — originally posted on MIT’s Technology Review — found that while “active foldering” reduces the complexity of the inbox, there’s a lack of systematic data about the extent to which these folders are actually used, so it’s hard to determine whether the hours occupied by filing emails to folders is time well spent.

Also, “frequent filers” tend to remember less than non-frequent filers about their email messages. The IBM Research study, which analyzed 345 frequent users’ methods of finding emails, found that email users tended to have pretty good memories when it came to content, purpose, or task-related information in emails, recalling more than 80 percent of such information; those who moved things into folders were less likely to remember these things, possibly because they were not frequently exposed to the information in the inbox.

Of course, users aren’t going to remember everything that’s conveyed in every email. But when it comes to effective search — which in some cases negates the need for all that foldering — remembering key words is, well, key.

Lastly, the study suggests that email threading is the better alternative to manually moving emails into designated folders. People with high thread-count emails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes, as well, suggesting that threads were an effective way to compress inbox information.

Gmail already has a pretty efficient search function and collates emails into threads. But as part of Google’s efforts to push Google+ in other areas — like search — the company is also suggesting Gmail solutions through Google+. In fact, new Gmail users don’t have a choice when it comes to Google+; building a profile is part of the sign-up process. (Google’s current Gmail user base: 350 million; Google’s social network users: Murky.) Searching for emails through Google+’s circles seems a bit confusing for the average user, though, and would benefit only those users who have spent a lot of time building up their Google+ contacts.

For those looking for outside apps to aid in email organization, some of the more popular ones include Xobni and Postbox. Others, such as Shortmail and Clarify, think simpler, shorter emails could put you on the path to inbox nirvana.

(Photo courtesy of robep/Flickr)

Here’s a year-end recap app that could actually be useful: ToutApp analyzes your email throughout the course of the year and provides data on your busiest month, day of the week and time of day for email exchanges. It also tells you who you email the most, who you receive the most emails from, and which marketers send the most emails.

An application that analyzes your email accounts may seem like a huge waste of time, but the purpose of ToutApp is to make users more aware of what their email patterns are so they could, theoretically, be more efficient with their time. According to Pingdom, 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide last year, up from 90 trillion in 2009; an average of 294 billion emails are sent per day.

ToutApp can take some time to work, depending on the size of your inbox. It took a couple hours for the ToutApp to scan my entire Gmail inbox — around 15,000 emails — and it eventually revealed that I receive more emails than I send. I also learned that January of this year was my busiest month in terms of email traffic (I’m going to unscientifically pin that one on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which probably upset the average), and that I send the most emails between 8 pm and 9 pm — which makes me a fantastic dinner date. ToutApp also listed individuals as well as circles of people I email with the most, and highlighted key words that often appear in my email.

Some of the data, such as the list of emails from marketers, could be channeled into usefulness. And ToutApp’s analysis says I received hundreds of Facebook notification emails this year, which reminded me that I should probably disable “Notifications,” as that would help declutter my inbox.

But other info — such as the fact that “FW” is a key word that often appears in my emails — didn’t tell me much, except that I get a lot of forwarded mail.

ToutApp only works on Gmail accounts, and in order for it to work, you have to allow it access to your Gmail account. The company is not affiliated with Google, and it says says that during the analysis process it will not have access to your password or any other personal info through your Google account.

Google’s information section on third-party access says the data and activities available to third-party sites, like the ToutApp, depend on the Google product;, some apps may not be able to add or modify data or may be able to see a small portion of data. (To unsubscribe after your ToutApp report is generated, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

ToutApp comes from a San Francisco-based start-up that offers email management services for business owners. According to its Web site, Tout is backed by venture capitalists Esther Dyson, Dave McClure and Eric Ries, along with other angel investors and seed-stage firms.

If you’re looking for apps that dissect non-Gmail accounts, a research group from the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford University has created something called MUSE, or Memories Using Email, that works to analyze and chart your exchanges across different email accounts. There’s also something called Topalt Reports for analyzing email through Microsoft Outlook.

Could Google’s Android be Facebook’s new best friend?

It just might be, although it’s unlikely the feeling is mutual.

In making Android open source, Google has given would-be rivals many of the tools they need to offer mobile devices with services that compete directly with those of the search giant.

Once Google releases that version of Android, companies are free to do virtually anything they want with the code. It is this openness that attracted Facebook to Android, even though Google is probably the company’s fiercest rival.

That’s because Facebook, like others, can use Android in ways that compete quite directly with Google, all without paying that company a penny. However, device makers have some tough choices to make when they decide how far they are going to deviate from Google’s proscribed path. Changing the code — known as “forking” — creates both business and technological challenges.

Those that don’t meet certain compatibility and other requirements can’t use Google’s mobile services, for example. In some respects, that’s no big deal, since in many cases Facebook will want to use its services and those of its partners, rather than those from Google. However, it also means that Facebook won’t have access to some things it might want, such as the Android Market for third-party programs.

To the degree Facebook wants other Android apps to run, it will need an alternative, such as Amazon’s App Store, or lesser-known stores such as those offered by companies like Appia and GetJar.

In addition to missing out on Google services, making changes too deeply can mean that apps designed to run on Android won’t work, and that the software will be hard to update once Google comes out with a new version of Android.

For most phone makers, the benefits of following Google’s plan outweigh the opportunity to do deeper customization.

Not everyone is choosing to stick to that path, however. Amazon, for example, uses Android for the Kindle Fire, but has done so in its own way. Others have tweaked Android, too, such as tablet maker Fusion Garage, which has layered its own tiled interface over Android for its recently released Grid 10 tablet.

In the case of the Kindle Fire, some but not all Android apps will run on the tablet device. Amazon has also hidden much of the user interface that is part of the stock Android release, and has put in its own browser, music and video services in place of Google’s.

For Facebook, there is the same kind of opportunity to offer its own services, including messaging.

But customizing Android isn’t necessarily a panacea to make Facebook competitive in the mobile space.

First, social is an important component of the smartphone, but not the only one. Customers also want a phone that can easily access multimedia, download apps and perform other tasks far outside Facebook’s traditional wheelhouse.

As a result, Facebook’s foray into mobile may also mean it needs to either create or partner for many services it doesn’t offer currently, including music and video services.

Still, it is understandable that Facebook might see Android as its most attractive option, even if there are others. Intel has been looking for partners for its mobile Linux efforts, for example, while HP is eager to find a good home for webOS.

However, neither of these come with what Android does — a huge base of consumers and developers already using the operating system.

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

“Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area,” Google said in a blog post.

Users with the app installed can continue to use it, Google said, but it won’t be supported, nor will it be available for continued download.

The move comes as Google is finally releasing a native Gmail app for the iPhone. The company released the app last week, but pulled it after discovering several bugs.

Google on Wednesday released an iOS app for Gmail, bringing a native email client to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

However, the reaction from early downloaders was nearly universally negative, with editors from Mashable, Engadget and other sites all having nothing nice to say.

“I have to admit, I’m near tears at how bad this gmail app is,” wrote the Verge’s Chris Ziegler in a post on Twitter. “Is it okay to cry?”

“Yeah, it’s horrible,” responded Engadget’s Myriam Joire.

For those who still want to experience it firsthand, the app is available from the App Store and works on all devices running iOS 4 and later.

UPDATE: Google says the Web has a point, and has pulled the app. Here’s the text of a Google+ “Googla culpa” post from Google “apps guy” Dave Girouard: “Earlier today we launched a new Gmail app for iOS. Unfortunately, it contained a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app. We’ve removed the app while we correct the problem, and we’re working to bring you a new version soon. Everyone who’s already installed the app can continue to use it.”

Many industry pundits have talked about the Consumerization of the Enterprise — the idea that enterprise users expect the mobility, integration and ease of consumer technologies in their work lives. People often cite the move to user-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone or user-provisioned collaboration services like Box, DropBox and Yammer as evidence of this phenomenon. And because many of these services have freemium models, IT departments are finding that huge numbers of their employees are already using these services for business purposes in addition to personal ones. So in many ways, consumer expectations are driving the ways enterprise CIOs think.

But what about the other side of the phenomenon? Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine influenced Dan Aykroyd’s character, Louis Winthorphe, III, as much as the reverse. What’s less discussed — but equally fascinating — is the impact of enterprise requirements on the consumerization trend.

Many of the aforementioned start-ups initially focused entirely on end-user needs, providing simple user interfaces and sign-ups, and building multi-million user customer bases in the process. But as these vendors switched focus from user acquisition to monetization, they realized some IT department requirements are legitimate, and more importantly, are barriers to sale.

The most recent example: Box. Box founder Aaron Levie probably never imagined his company would be working with enterprise IT directors in designing his product roadmap when he started his file sharing company, but nonetheless it recently announced partnerships and integrations around identity federation, mobile security, e-discovery, and other IT-centric areas.

In contrast, DropBox has continued to focus heavily on end-user adoption with limited IT focus. Indeed, their total reported user counts dwarf those of Box or any other service. Yet the CIOs I’ve spoken with had a proliferation of users on DropBox and Box when they decided to standardize on a collaboration service. Despite the fact that their companies may have had more DropBox users, Box’s enterprise functionality tipped the scale in its favor. So while user adoption gets you in the door, without some enterprization you don’t get the sale.

Similarly, for Google’s Enterprise team, bringing Gmail to companies involved a lot more than just learning how to charge for the service. Google has spent the past several years trading places with Microsoft, investing in policy management, security, compliance and other IT-centric functionality to address early inhibitors to adoption. And it has worked. Analyst firm Gartner now sees Google as a viable alternative to Exchange for enterprise collaboration.

Indeed, even in the truly consumerized world of mobile devices, iPhones and Androids don’t roam free in most large companies. Many security-sensitive organizations are investing in Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions like those from Good, MobileIron, Zenprise and Symantec, to bring enterprise manageability to smartphones.

The Enterprization of these traditionally consumer apps is going to center around three legitimate enterprise requirements:

1. Data ownership: While enterprises are excited to leverage the flexibility and fluidity of cloud apps, the idea of an enterprise’s intellectual property spread across hundreds of cloud services, many times in user-provisioned accounts where the enterprise has no access, is scary. What if the company is involved in a lawsuit and has to put a user’s data on legal hold? How can the company recover data if the cloud service loses it? And most importantly, how can the company get its data back if it wants to change services? Tough questions if the data is trapped behind a user’s personal cloud account.
2. Data security: Similarly, the thought of sensitive customer information living in cloud accounts where users choose passwords like “password” or, for the more secure, “password1,” is nerve-wracking to a security officer. How can the company ensure that its data is protected with strong passwords? When an employee leaves, how can the company revoke access to all cloud apps at once? Without company administrative rights, the enterprise is dependent on the judgment of the user.
3. Data compliance: Whether data is stored on your G:\ drive or in Gmail, if it’s work-related, for the most part the same compliance rules apply. While SOX, FRCP and GLBA are not as sexy as FourSquare, Angry Birds and AirBnB, they are still critical for most companies. How can companies meet regulatory requirements around searchability, records retention, logging and other areas?

The real challenge as start-ups address the needs of enterprises is to maintain the core value that earned users in the first place. If they add every feature IT asks for, will the products lose their usability? If they make it easier to lock down access to the systems with two-factor logins when you can’t remember one factor, will users revolt? If these tools were used to get around IT, will the fact that they can now be monitored scare users away?

Time will tell. But this grand experiment would make the “Trading Places” brothers proud. And a lot more than $1 is at stake.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

The first two Smartr apps are for Gmail and Android, available today; the next one on the list is iPhone. The Gmail and Android apps had previously been in beta, so the news today is more about the overall strategy than their existence. Xobni’s Outlook product will continue to be called Xobni.

All the Smartr apps will learn from users’ emailing, social networking and calling histories, compiling a detailed and constantly updated dossier on each contact. That expresses itself in some handy features, like an autosuggesting email composer that understands which people belong in a group together and whether to use their work or personal email.

That kind of feature may be especially useful on mobile, where users can type just a few letters rather than scroll through alphabetical lists of people they know.

Another Smartr feature compiles an automatic Twitter list of the accounts for all the people a user has recently emailed.

Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte said upcoming Smartr apps will include caller ID and map views, and described recent company hack projects such as a Facebook app that shows when two users first met and an Assassins-style game.

Bonus video: Does the new brand make anyone else think of “The Simpsons”? See below:

I am looking for a tablet that can run Outlook and all Microsoft Office programs, and connect to Microsoft server-based business programs. Is there anything now or in the near future with this functionality?

A:

Yes. While Windows 7 wasn’t designed primarily as a tablet operating system, it does support touch, and thus a number of companies sell tablets that run Windows 7, and therefore, presumably, the Windows software you mention. These companies include Acer, Asus, and ViewSonic. I haven’t tested any of these, because Microsoft’s true tablet operating system will be Windows 8, which is expected to be out next year.

Q:

I use Gmail. When I type the name of a correspondent, the email address shows up. However, if the correspondent has given me a new email address, the old one still shows up, which is totally confusing. How can I get rid of the old address?

A:

One way to do it is to either enter the person’s correct address in your Gmail contacts list, or edit the old one if that’s in the contact list.

You can get to the contacts list by clicking on “Contacts” in the left sidebar of Gmail. More information about Google contacts is here.

Q:

My wife and I love the simple photography-editing application on my Mac. Are there any apps that offer good basic photo-editing features for the iPad?

A:

There are many iPad apps that let you make simple edits to photos, though none that I know of with the editing power of a PC or Mac photo-editing program. One iPad app in this category that I have used and like is Adobe Photoshop Express. This app is free, though a package of extra features costs $5.

Write to Walt at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

Prior investors General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.4 million. Avalon’s Brady Bohrmann will join Backupify’s board.

I talked with CEO Rob May, who told me about his plan to accelerate marketing and adoption of Backupify by users of Google Apps, the search giant’s Web-based business suite of applications that is proving popular with businesses. So far, Backupify is being used to back up the files on 5,000 Google Apps domains. He says he would also like to offer Backupify for several other services that users have been requesting. In addition, May wants to boost Backupify’s visibility among the many third-party partners — like, say, Cloud Sherpas — who work with businesses deploying Google Apps.

The outfit is growing fast. It has 175,000 users and stores 200 terabytes of data for its users, not just from Google apps, but also from Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, and the Zoho Web-based office suite. One public customer is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which uses Backupify to back up the Google Apps data generated by some 1,000 users. The data is all backed up to Amazon Web Services, but users can also download local copies of their data.

Why would you need to back up data that’s on a supposedly reliable cloud service? Because you might goof up — and delete something you didn’t mean to — just as easily in the cloud as on your PC. May says that roughly one-third of all data loss occurs because of user error. “We hear a lot of different things. When you delete something, Google assumes you meant to delete it. Sometimes things get deleted maliciously by a hacker, or someone who gets ahold of a password that wasn’t taken care of,” he says. “IT administrators want their own backup copy they can restore from. They trust Google not to lose it, but they don’t always trust their own users.”

Backupify’s $4.5 million A round was also led by Avalon and joined by General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Prior to that, First Round Capital led a $900,000 seed round, which was joined by Betaworks and several individual investors, including Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis.

Let’s face it: Everyone in Silicon Valley — one way or another — fashions themselves as the next Steve Jobs.

And why not? Both the professional and even personal story of the legendary Apple CEO — which will be chronicled in November in a major book — are the stuff of tech legend and envy: Iconic, in charge, decisive, elegant, innovative, phoenix-like and visionary.

And, of course, more than just a little bit terrifying.

So why not Larry Page, too, and why not now?

One issue: By temperament and action — by which I mean genetically hyper-competitive and hammer-time aggressive — he’s been more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has been the Yin to Jobs’ Yang in their deeply interconnected careers over the last decades.

As I wrote before Page took over again as Google’s CEO earlier this year:

After our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

The latest incarnation of that has been Page’s move — bold for now and we’ll-see later — to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which Google announced yesterday.

By all accounts, Page was the key driver of the deal inside Google, where he now reigns firmly.

Although neither Gates nor Jobs has used acquisitions much as a key weapon in their arsenals, the size and scope of the deal is pure Gates: A focused, overwhelming and competitor-scaring display of might that speaks of industry dominance and play-to-destroy aspirations, masking what is also very reactive.

If Page’s doubling down on mobile reminds you a bit of Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum in 1995, that’s because the move-now tone is the same.

And, also, in that it is more than just a little bit sneaky. Case in point: Google’s yammering on about the importance of Motorola’s patents in the deal. While the patent love is true and an important element, bolstering Google’s own weak portfolio, it’s also a bit of a feint by the search giant, which can simply never come out and say what it is actually up to.

Which is to be the dominant and overwhelming player in the mobile market that Google sees as critical to its future.

“The company obviously wants everyone to focus on the patents, but its ambitions are so much larger in mobile,” said one person close to the situation. “So it underplays as it overplays.”

Indeed, in the time I covered Google, it has always been my experience when the search giant insists stringently on one thing, Page and others are playing a more complex version of “Star Trek” three-dimensional chess.

As the New York Times’ DealBook noted correctly:

If there’s any question about Google’s motivation to own a handset maker rather than just a portfolio of patents, consider this: InterDigital, a licensing company that owns some 8,000 wireless patents and has another 10,000 patent applications being processed, has been up for auction. Many industry insiders were sure that if Google were serious about acquiring a portfolio of patents, InterDigital would be its target. The company’s market value is only about $3 billion and it doesn’t come with all the baggage of Motorola’s handset business.

That’s exactly right, because Page’s ambition is about Google playing a big part in the mobile market — which is humanity’s next critical platform in computing — for its interlocked ecosystem of Google products — from its flagship search to social networking via Google+ to Gmail to its latest Google Wallet initiative to Google Maps to Google Voice.

In other words, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it.

At the heart of it is a desire to make and completely control the object at the center of the virtuous circle: The mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, tablet or whatever doodad you might wear around your neck.

In fact, as I also remember from Google’s earliest days, Page did sport a lot of such contraptions back then, such as a communicator of some sort he once joyfully showed off to me that allowed him to reach Brin quickly. Later, it was a kind of pollution sensor that took its place.

My recollection from that time was that Page adored such objects, visibly inspired by the idea of digital devices that delivered a myriad of helpful and smart services to users as they moved around the world.

You know, like an Apple iPhone, the ground-breaking technical achievement that Jobs rendered unto the world less than a decade ago, changing everything.

With Android and Page’s firm backing, Google quickly and smartly jumped partway into that market with its powerful and fast-growing mobile operating system.

Now, like Jobs, I have no doubt Page wants to own and control the whole value chain to solidify what Google started several years ago and which is its best hope to vault into the next era of computing.

It’s a leap that Gates and Microsoft largely failed at, not for lack of trying — something else Page has to have taken note of.

So, perhaps by making things — maybe even beautiful things like Jobs — Page will transform himself from a Gates into a Jobs.

Or, more likely, a little bit of both.

Until that reckoning, here is a terrific video of Spock playing 3D chess with Captain James T. Kirk — and, yes, he does look freakishly like Page here:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

Topify’s Arik Fraimovich is the latest of many developers to blame Twitter for his problems; he said in a blog post that the fact that Twitter recently removed without notice the email headers he used to power his service was the last straw.

He clarified via email, “The main reason behind the Topify shutdown isn’t the technical change [Twitter] did, but the lack of communication before and after they did it and feeling that they don’t care about the smaller developers.”

Topify was a nifty tool that helped users manage Twitter from their email inboxes. After users set up their Twitter notifications to be sent to a Topify-managed address, Topify would augment each email sent by Twitter with user profile and other information, then forward the notification to a user’s primary email addresses and respond to commands sent back via replies to the emails.

So, for instance, if someone followed you on Twitter, you’d get an email with details about who, exactly, she is, and could quickly reply to that email to follow her back (see screenshot below).

Companies and independent developers who build on top of Twitter have repeatedly dealt with obstacles like policy changes and direct competition from Twitter itself — for example, Twitter banned rival ad networks last spring and launched its own photo-hosting service earlier this summer. (A far more surprising story is to hear that a developer or outside investor is happy with the Twitter ecosystem!)

So how is Topify any different? Asked about Fraimovich’s complaints, Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson replied, “This is an unusual one, since headers included in emails sent by Twitter.com have never been documented/supported by the Twitter Platform, and are not part of the API.”

Twitter does provide support for some of the same functions through its beta Site Streams API, Fraimovich noted, and it has improved its own notification emails significantly in the two years since Topify launched.

However, Fraimovich argued in a developer discussion thread, that use of email headers “was a documented feature (at least in the old dev site) and not some hack.”

Fraimovich, who is based in Israel and co-founded Topify with Ouriel Ohayon, said he had intended to introduce a freemium model for Topify at some point but ultimately never made any money from the project. His costs were low, though, he said: Just server bills and his time.

Fraimovich recommended that Topify users looking for an alternative try a somewhat similar Gmail service called Rapportive.

Of course, Google itself has one billion monthly unique visitors and just a teensy bit of brand recognition, and it seeded its new network carefully. But Plus is invite-only. Just imagine what would happen if Google opened the floodgates by promoting Plus on all its products.

If we look back, Google actually did have a bigger social network launch in the past, but not organically: It rolled out Buzz as a feature of Gmail available to all users. (Google doesn’t say how many Gmail users there are, but it’s well into the millions.)

Facebook, by contrast, took more than two years to reach 10 million users, and only hit the milestone after opening its network beyond college and high-school students.

Facebook’s numbers are slightly different, because it only counts users who were active within the last month. But at this point, every single Google+ member has been active within the last month.

I’d like to cast a broader net for examples, if anyone has them, but I’m having trouble finding historical active user counts for fast-growing networks like Sina Weibo. We also know Twitter grew somewhat slowly out of the gate, but it has resisted disclosing official active user counts.

Products built on top of existing social networks, and ones built for virality rather than invite-only rollout, however, have the potential for a much faster growth curve. Zynga’s most recent launch, Empires & Allies, got to 10 million users in nine days, just slightly behind the pace of CityVille, according to Inside Social Games and AppData.

UberMedia CEO Bill Gross, whose company is currently most active in the Twitter ecosystem but will presumably also develop clients for Google+, recently predicted that Google+ would hit 100 million users faster than any service in history. Well, Google’s numbers don’t make that a reality yet, but there’s only 90 million to go!

Meanwhile, Page also said on Thursday that Google+ facilitates one billion items shared and received per day. We clarified with Google the way it calculated this number.

Essentially, each counted “share” is the number of people who potentially see any one item.

If a user shares a picture with a Google Circle of 40 people, that counts as 40 shares — even if all 40 people don’t actually look at the photo. If a user shares something publicly, it’s not counted.

Google said this is consistent with the way it counts sharing in Gmail and other products. However, it’s a bit of a tricky metric; at first glance it would be easy to think that Google means one billion items are posted to Google+ on a daily basis already — which it doesn’t.

One interesting side note about Google+ reaching 10 million users — the milestone had actually been estimated by an outside researcher using fascinating methodology. Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com who is now at FamilyLink, calculated the percent of the U.S. population that had signed up for Google+ by comparing user surnames to census data and extrapolating for international users. He estimated Google+ had 10 million users as of July 12 (two days before the second-quarter earnings announcement).

After earnings came out yesterday, Bradley Horowitz, the Google VP who coleads Plus development, gave credit to Allen in a Google+ post of his own. “BTW, +Paul Allen… Tip of the hat to you sir. Neat parlor trick. Statistics FTW!”

Photo credit: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA