Quoted: Google announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2008 today, and it’s good news: The company once again beat Wall Street’s estimates. Net revenues stood at $4.22 billion, or $5.10 per share. Wall Street had been looking for something more like $4.12 billion in net revenue, or $4.96 a share.

Quoted: In 2008 Google HR set up a private Google Group to ask former employees why they left the company. We’ve been forwarded what appears to be authentic posts to the thread by a number of ex-Googlers, which we reprint below minus identifying information other than their first names. The thread shows a brutal honesty about what it’s like to work at Google ...

Quoted: Last night at the offices of blogging software company Six Apart, engineers and social media specialists from a number of companies large and small met to discuss proposed standards for the future of "activity streams" - the system of displaying recent activities of your friends online.

Quoted: Until now, Google’s App Engine has been a great playground for coders: Everyone gets a daily quota of computing resources to play with. But without understanding how pricing will work when you go beyond those quotas, it’s been harder to understand business models built on it. Today, however, Google has shown us how the pricing model will work.

Quoted: “Everyone loves Google.” So began a 2001 Wired profile of the company and its “resolutely uncommercial” path to success. Everyone loves Google. Sounds like so much hyperbole now, but at the time it was essentially a truism. Eight years later, that’s no longer really the case.

Quoted: Google abandoned [its deal with Yahoo] not because pressing ahead with it “risked” a protracted legal battle, but because it guaranteed one. I wrote that on Nov. 6, following the official dissolution of Google’s (GOOG) proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo (YHOO). Turns out the guarantee to which I referred was an ironclad one.

Quoted: HTC, which makes the first phone to use Google’s Android platform, the T-Mobile G1, said it expects shipments of the device to reach one million before the end of 2008, according to DigiTimes. The number, stated by HTC chief executive Peter Chou a few days ago, represents a significant increase from the company’s original forecast that it would ship ...

Quoted: It's been a little over a year since Google announced OpenSocial, a common API for social applications across multiple websites. It's an aggressive undertaking: an underlying technology designed to help all developers add intelligent social features to their offerings more quickly and easily, regardless of the types of sites they're developing.