Brin, Schmidt and Page of Google.

Valleywag, the cheeky Gawker news source on Silicon Valley, claims that Larry Page has reacted to Google’s stock quote fall by wreaking havoc in the Googleplex:

“Here’s some fuel for your fire: a couple weeks ago, at a regular engineering all-hands, Larry Page went on a half-hour rant that left the entire engineering team wondering if he’s gone nuts.

“He spent a long time lecturing everyone about how we’re not smart enough to pick the right projects to work on, and he singled out a couple of projects (in front of hundreds of engineers) to complain about because they weren’t using shared infrastructure components.

“Then he announced that he doesn’t want people to use 20% time to work on new ideas — yep, Larry has suddenly decided that the only good way to use 20% time is to work on someone else’s project.

“So don’t expect to see any products like Google News coming out any time soon.”

Did this really happen? The Valley wag gives us a non-commital update:

“Update: A source says that CEO Eric Schmidt may have started the drama during discussions over Google Video, and that this may all be old news to the Googlefolk.”

They’d hardly be human if they didn’t show some emotion at the recent slew of bad news. So they’re not zombies after all. Hold the front page.

Search Engine Journal has been monitoring tell-tale signs that Google Finance may be about to launch. Loren Baker writes:

“Over the past three or four hours Search Engine Journal has noticed some interesting referrals from Google.com/finance. After visitng the referring URL, I saw that the live Google 404 “The requested URL /finance was not found on this server.” Error which usually leads to a hint that Google is launching a new service.”

Let’s hope it goes better than some recent launches, like Google Pages, which has been suspended for a while.

Garett Rogers, who last week broke the story about Gmail for Domains based on a line of code spotted in the source, has discovered a new feature: voicemail.

It seems the G-guys are adding features all the time, at least in seed form. Maybe they’re just drumming up a bit of much-needed feelgood to bolster the southward tendency of the share price.

Whatever, here’s how Rogers describes his find:

A voicemail service will allow people to use Gmail as an answering machine that won’t run out of space or need rewinding — who knows, maybe it will be searchable using speech to text technology. This service will be most useful when Google starts providing full VoIP services, but until then it could be used for missed GTalk calls. Recorded messages will be available for listening through Gmail — possibly with a flash applet designed to play them like Google Reader’s podcast feature.

Life gets complicated, don’t it?

At a hearing of the House International Relations subcommittee, Representative Tom Lantos, the full committee’s top Democrat, told Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco that their “abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.”

He went on to charge them with amassing great wealth and influence “but apparently very little social responsibility.”

In reply, a Google representative acknowledged that coming to terms with China’s internet market “has been a difficult exercise.”

Elliot Schrage from Google said: “the requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company.”

Nevertheless, Google had decided to enter China because it thought it “will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”

Wired.com reports: “Google urged the State Department and the U.S. trade representative to press U.S. concerns on censorship during talks with foreign governments. … China says its aims are benign — to protect its citizens, and especially children, from ‘the immoral and harmful content’ of the internet.”