I’m hearing about a few things that Google is planning to do to newly compete with Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.

Several people have told me about an offline version of Gmail, coming soon.
Other people say that Google, or a company working with Google, is going to come out with a new server that will let corporations replace their Exchange servers with ones made by Google. Both groups told me under condition that I not reveal who they are.

Now, it might be that my sources are pulling my legs, but I don’t think so. The news is coming from too many different places. I’m reporting this to explain that Google seems like it’s about to apply more pressure in the enterprise space and see if anything else is happening that I don’t know about. The audience here is far smarter and far more connected than I am.

From what I hear we won’t have to wait for Google’s next developer conference to see some of these things come out, although that’s not too far off either.

But what are you hearing?

The blog world is seeing more change right now than I’ve seen in years.

Mike Arrington is close to those changes, and reports on some of them (money, linking, and cliques).

Mark Cuban caused a bunch of noise a few days back by writing that newspapers shouldn’t call their blogs “blogs” because it destroys their brand. Hey, I agree with that. FastCompanyLive is really my videoblog, but I don’t call it that. Cuban followed it up with another post that’s very astute. Says what matters is why you do what you do.

Mike Arrington, again, told us about stats that Yahoo Buzz brings blogs (millions of readers). I find it interesting that bloggers are interested in the huge audiences. I really don’t care, I want the right audience, not a large one (believe it or not, so does my sponsor, Seagate).

And then there’s the FriendFeed thing. That’s bringing me a bigger change in the people I’m reading than I’ve seen in many years.

If you are a blogger, or a blog reader (hey) are you seeing changes?

I just switched all my home pages off of TechMeme to FriendFeed.

I find that TechMeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

I miss the individual voices and I think that’s really why FriendFeed has gotten my attention.

Well, that and the fact that Google Reader has just been getting more and more unusable lately. This morning I couldn’t even get it to open up. It’s so freaking slow.

Now, at SXSW I met the guy who runs the Google Reader team and he promises major speed improvements “soon.” But right now it’s totally frustrating and FriendFeed is just totally thrilling.

On top of FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.

That’s thrilling. Why? Because I’m hearing new voices, discovering new blogs, and seeing early adopter behavior in a more pure state. A more “live” state.

It’s exactly what used to thrill me about TechMeme, but then TechMeme needed to move up the stack to try to get a mass-market audience.

Google Reader is being killed by its addition of a social network (which was implemented poorly and is falling apart for someone like me, who likes following hundreds of people).

How about you? Are you changing your reading behavior because of FriendFeed?