sockparade

google woes

Dear Google,

I am one of your most loyal users.  I use the word “google” in its lower-case verb form on a daily basis, I use Gmail exclusively for all of my email needs, I use Google Calendar to coordinate my family’s schedule and even my friends’ schedules, I use Google Documents to collaborate on trip planning as well as other brainstorming needs, I use Google Groups to organize the student organizations that I am in, I use Google Images almost as frequently as I use the web, I use Google Maps to find my way around the city and on vacation, I use YouTube to entertain myself, and I even used Blogger once upon a time before I decided to buy my own hosting space.

This past year, I have adopted the use of Google Reader into my online regimen and it has served me fairly well.  I have been able to share things with friends that would have normally just fallen to the back of my mind never to be revisited again.  It has also pushed me to keep up to date on interesting news and hobbies that I have and I feel it makes me efficient with my time on the web.  It has been such a pleasant experience that I have convinced many of my friends to start using Google Reader (even the husband has joined, and I’m sure you know how difficult that is since I’m sure you are familiar with his online click patterns!) and I sing the praises of Google everywhere I go.  I think of it kind of as a volunteer gig.  In fact, I’m considering listing “Freelance/Volunteer Google PR Rep” right underneath speaking at Career Day at the Houston Hispanic Forum.

There are two things I don’t use of yours and for good reasons.  I don’t use Picasa to share pictures because Flickr is light years ahead of Picasa as far as interface and community go and you really messed up big time when you let Yahoo! buy Flickr.  Because of that mistake, I have to maintain a Yahoo! account that I only use for the purposes of Flickr.  The other thing I don’t use of yours is the G1 because the G1 is bulky, ugly and doesn’t have a slick UI like the iPhone.

All this to say, I am a fan.  I support what you do.  So please take what I have to say in context.

There are a lot of things you need to fix:

• You didn’t buy Flickr and now it belongs to Yahoo (yes, this is worth mentioning again)
• Your load times are starting to suck.  When I first joined Gmail, I could click on a link to Gmail and my inbox would appear within seconds.  Now when I click on a link to Gmail, I see this:

Then after a few seconds, I see my inbox.  I don’t know why I put up with this, but I do.  Many times a day.

• There are too many “Gmail is having problems, please check later” incidents.  Thankfully you released an offline option to Gmail and some other Google Services but downtime for email is really just unacceptable.
• Google Labs.  While I do appreciate many of the functions offered through Google Labs, why not offer it through the settings so that you don’t have to manually turn on labs and then enable the services?  And why do you have people wasting their time to develop functions such as “Canned Responses”, “Old Snakey” or “Mail Goggles”?  I mean, really?  Is this your best use of resources?
• When are you taking Gmail out of Beta version?
• Why didn’t you think it was a good idea to buy Flickr?
• Why have you made it so unintuitive to add friends on Google Reader?  Here’s the official answer on Google Help:

“Reader’s friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list. Some friends might have been added to your chat list automatically if you’ve emailed back and forth with them; if you don’t want any more contacts added this way, you can change this setting.“

Why didn’t you just create a quick and easy way to add a friend to your reader by putting their email address in a field?  Surely you could have gotten Dave C. to work on that instead of having him work on Old Snakey!

• You finally enabled comments on Google Reader!  Thank you.  Why did you forget to add a new comment count?  You have counts for newly shared feeds, why not for new comments?  How will we know when there are new comments?
• When we see comments on someone’s shared feed, why not give us the option to add them as a friend?  Are you still using the pre-Facebook definition of the word “friend” and the pre-Twitter definition of the word “contact”?
• How come when I see someone’s public page of shared feeds, I don’t have the ability to add them as a Google Reader contact?
• When are you going to improve Google Finance so that I don’t have to switch over to Yahoo! Finance?
• When are you going to add Google Cars so that I don’t have to rely on Yahoo! Cars?

I better stop, my cheeks are starting to get hot.

Look, I still want this to work out and I’m not making any ultimatums here.  I just want you to stop taking me for granted and get to work on fixing some things.  And I know you aren’t really the jealous type but while I was researching Nambu, I found out about FriendFeed which looks pretty great.  That’s all I want to say about that.

Yours truly,

It’s Complicated in Houston

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MAN. I felt like I was at a google rally. I nodded to just about EVERYTHING you bullet pointed and then pumped my fist in the air at the end. Did you send this to someone at Google?

i think the worst part about google is its interface. it’s fugly. you also forgot to mention you use firefox not chrome. that was a major MAJOR failure.

i think they would frown upon using google as a verb. while you mean to literally search using google, trademark law frowns upon using a trademark as a verb.

i think google set the bar a little high for itself with you. i’m just glad they are at least in enough different market spaces to make the next guy do a better job.

while i agree google interface isn’t pretty, its functional, which i’d pick over flashy any day

and chrome, no good, but it’s still early

you seem to just want a gWorld…which is what people hated microsoft for

Jen (your name is really long), I didn’t send it to Google. Usually they are already working on the things I complain about… I just need to learn to be more patient.

Husband, yeah, I don’t know why I forgot about Chrome. The only reason I don’t like it is because there’s no reason for me to switch to it. Safari is faster and Firefox has extensions. I agree with JWu about google interface, I like it nice and simple and I think the reader looks great with the notes.

JWu, i think the Google Legal Team would frown on it but the Google Marketing Team would jump for joy! Substituting brand names for nouns and verbs is a sign of market dominance! And not to mention it’s free advertising. I never hated Microsoft for trying to provide a total solution to computing needs… not sure why anyone would — except for breaking antitrust laws, which I believe they were punished for.

but why can’t google make something that functions well AND looks great? it’s not that hard. there are more things out there that looks great than functions well. i almost feel like they don’t want to make their products look great because they’re snobby like that.

good use of the key word “total solution” btw.

hmmm, am I the only one that doesn’t think Google’s page is ugly? I see a logo, and a search field. and that’s about it. and that’s beautiful to me. Like a good ol’ safety razor. No rechargeable battery, no rotating heads, no whirring blades. There is an elegant beauty to its spartan appearance, and I get the same feeling about Google.

And this may be my experience only, but Firefox crashes on me more often than Chrome does, and Chrome loads pages pretty darn quickly for me. I’ve used Safari on Mac’s, and found it to be agonizingly slow. Safari is supposed to run circles around its competition when it comes to java, but maybe I just don’t come across java sites as often as you do? But then again, I think Macs are agonizingly slow in everything except photoshop and file transfers.

But I’m with you on several things; i reluctantly still use yahoo finance too. Oh, but I’ll always have a yahoo account because they run the largest fantasy league organization. And I don’t see google coming out with that.