John Adams Will Try To “Fix Twitter”

John Adams, Twitter’s new Ops Engineer (and apparently a descendant of the guy from the HBO series), said in a Twitter message today (where else) that he’ll be working to “fix twitter.” While I’m guessing that isn’t exactly how Twitter would like to have him describe his new job, we wanted to know more. So TechCrunchIT’s Steve Gillmor put a camera in his face and made him talk. Interview above. Good luck John!

I spoke with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about Adams’ hire via email this afternoon. He begins on July 7. They’ve also hired Rudy Winnacker from Google, where he has been a systems engineer for the past five years.

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1.5 Million Australian Students Dump Outlook/Exchange For Gmail

Google just took away one of the world’s largest Outlook/Exchange installations for 1.5 million students at Australian schools, and replaced it with Gmail. More information is here.

The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008. User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB.

This is being called the largest single deployment of Gmail in the world, we’ve emailed Google for a comment.

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Rumor: Google To Launch Hosted Site Search, Ditch Mini

A source has informed us that Google plans to announce the replacement of its Mini Search Appliance with a new enterprise search solution called Hosted Site Search in the next few days.

We hear it will be a for-pay product that, as the name suggests, will allow businesses to search their websites and other data stores in the cloud. In addition to moving this type of search off-premise (the Mini sits behind the firewall), the Hosted solution will differentiate itself by automatically including organizations’ webpages in the Google index. This feature, however, is said not to affect anyone’s page rank.

Suppliers who help Google manufacture the Mini apparently have been told to reduce their shipment forecasts for the product because it will be shelved soon. The shift in strategy is also understood as a response to Microsoft’s gains in the appliance-based search market.

The Mini is a less powerful version of Google Search Appliance, which can index millions of documents and 220 file types. The Mini, by contrast, can only search up to 300,000 documents and is therefore meant for smaller businesses.

It’s not exactly clear what this decision means for the enterprise search industry, but it won’t be surprising if Google does indeed come out with a cloud-based solution.

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eXpresso Gets $2 Million To Grow An Online Office Suite

eXpresso is an online collaboration tool around Excel spreadsheets. While a bit late to the game, they have plans to expand to other productivity tools as well. They will be announcing a new $2 million round of financing from Novus and Rocket Ventures on Monday, with the target of raising another $2 million soon. This is on top another couple million they’ve made off the sale of their original product, Smart DB, to Rocket Software (no relation to the venture group). The money will be put towards expanding their current Excel product and building a online Powerpoint application due out next Summer as well.

However, eXpresso isn’t the usual AJAX online spreadsheet competitor. Rather, it’s a series of collaboration tools and back-end database secret sauce wrapped around Microsoft’s own online spreadsheet editor, Microsoft Excel Web Component. This avoids a lot of the compatibility issues faced by other editors when they try to import Excel documents on to their platforms. The company seems oddly positioned by leaning heavily on Microsoft’s technology, but CEO George Langan assures me that they can continue to develop the component without Microsoft’s support and have a great deal of patented IP in the database system they run on. Microsoft has abandoned the technology themselves, announcing an end to development of the Office Web Components. Instead, they are focusing on developing new technologies around Microsoft Sharepoint.

The spreadsheet editor works smoothly, provides a familiar interface, and exposes a great deal of Excel’s desktop functionality online. You can edit cells, add formulas, sort, filter, and format. Google and Zoho have been aggressively adding a lot of these features themselves, but support auto-fill and charts as well. They also offer more applications. You can create a new file from within the program or sync one directly from Excel using their plug-in. eXpresso also offers file permissions (down to cell ranges), enables real time chat, and file management (version control, spreadsheet comparison). It’s currently free in beta, but will cost $10 or less per seat when it’s finally released into production.