More great guidance from Jereiah Owyang, this time on Google’s approach to the recent rise of social applications, and why their long view might be the most clear-sighted…

Then, one day, Google decided that we could all change a couple of zone files and point our mail traffic at their servers, and they would be delighted if came in a used their beautiful applications … for free. And it wasn’t just email. It was integrated calendaring and chat, and it was all built on open standards with easy accessibility through a set of APIs. Google decided that anyone could use their suite of online applications to manage the communications within their domain.