Tagged: google

Google Reader dumbness


While I love and use Google Reader every single day, some of its dumb-ness really annoys the hell out of me. Specially because these bugs are relatively easy to fix.

For instance, Google Reader doesn’t detect duplicate feeds. In particular, it will let me add the //same// feed, to the //same// folder as many times I like. Check out the screenshot for a sample.

{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/screenshot3.png|Duplicate feeds in Google Reader}}

Similarly, if I have the same feed in two different folders (or labels, in GMail lingo), Reader doesn’t mark an item as read if I read it in one of the folders. GMail already does this quite nicely, so I’m at a total loss as to why Reader doesn’t do it.

I’ve already [[http://floatingsun.net/2006/12/08/google-reader-needs-rename-tags/|ranted earlier]] about the lack of support for renaming tags/folder names, and the __still__ obviously missing search. Its kind of funny that search giant Google won’t let me search my feeds in its flagship feed reader.

Come on Google Reader team, you can surely do better! (btw, I did search the [[http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-help|Google group for Reader]], but couldn’t find any useful information on these issue)

Why isn’t Google killing Ringo and Plaxo?


Have you ever been in a situation where you called a friend or sent them a post card, only to realize that they have moved/changed their number and you just don’t have the updated information? Its pretty frustrating. Making the problem even more complicated is the fact that most of us have such information spread out across a lot of places: orkut/facebook profiles, online address books (such as Yahoo or Google), our local addressbooks etc.

The same goes for dates you’d like to remember. For instance, wouldn’t it be cool if lets say I were getting engaged, I would just add it to my calendar and modulo access rights and such, all of my friends would automatically be notified and have the option of adding the date to their calendars?

The other issue with this whole contact management problem is that there are no prevalent standards. I would like to access my addressbook and calendar from my desktop email client, my gmail account and my telephone. If anyone in my addressbook moves or updates their contact information, I’d like to be notified and have those changes be reflected in my addressbook.

I think this is a very hot consumer space and certainly there are already some companies offering solutions. Two popular ones are [[http://ringo.com|Ringo]] and [[http://plaxo.com|Plaxo]].

[[http://ringo.com|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/screenshot1.png|Ringo}}]]

Ringo is sort of a more old school kind of solution. The idea is that you and all of your friends create an account on Ringo, and you are responsible for keeping your own information up to date. Whenever any one in your contact list updates their information, you will be notified. I call this an old school solution because AFAIK there is no integration with existing email clients, no calendar support and so on. Ringo can only take you so far. Recently, Ringo has also shifted its focus to “photo and video sharing made easy”, which seems very weird to me.

[[http://plaxo.com|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/screenshot2.png|Plaxo}}]]

Anyways, Plaxo is a much more interesting company. It does a LOT of what I want. Here’s a quote from the website:


//”… the only online address book and calendar that syncs with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, the Mac, Thunderbird, and your mobile phone!”//

You can manage your contacts/calendar through the Plaxo website. Additionally, Plaxo provides downloads for Thunderbird, Outlook etc that enable you to sync and use your contacts and calendar from these tools. I haven’t used it extensively yet, but so far it looks very promising.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. I’m actually very disappointed by Google’s addressbook, specially given the quality of the rest of their products. It is a pale, feature sparse offering when compared to gmail or Google calendar. Ideally, I’d like Google to export an LDAP interface to my contacts — its a fairly mature technology and almost all desktop email clients have robust support for LDAP addressbooks.

Technology apart, I think doing this kind of integration //makes a lot of sense// for Google. They have the infrastructure, and its a network effect kind of thing. For instance, Google Calendar becomes so much more useful if your colleagues and collaborators are also using it. Google Calendar also enables developers to interact with it by means of several APIs: XML, RSS, iCal, HTTP etc. For instance, Mozilla Sunbird recently released a new version which has in-built support for Google Calendar.

Even if they don’t provide LDAP support, they should at least open up the APIs. Then people can go ahead and write extensions for Thunderbird, plugins for KMail etc. Google also needs to make the contact interface richer and more complete. For instance, I would like to associate important dates with my contacts (birthdays and anniversaries), URLs (blogs and websites). I would like to tag my contacts as well, just as I tag my mail. The good thing is that all of these are already supported by the VCard standard (and KMail leverages this very well).

So why isn’t Google killing Plaxo yet? May be they’ll just buy them out :)

RTM has the best Christmas gift!


I use [[http://calendar.google.com|Google Calendar]] to manage my day, and [[http://rememberthemilk.com|Remember the Milk]] (henceforth RTM) to manage my todo list(s). Google calendar has effectively killed off all competition (like [[http://30boxes.com|30 Boxes]]), and its really becoming a joy to use as they improve integration with GMail and other services. Meanwhile RTM is probably the only other web app that I use on a daily basis — its fast, I //love// the keyboard shortcuts, the notifications work great and it basically stays out of my way. The only problem was having to use two different tools (Google and RTM) for such closely related tasks (calendar and todo lists).

So yesterday when I read about the [[http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2006/11/add-your-tasks-to-google-calendar.html|new RTM integration with Google calendar]], I was elated! Take a look at the screenshots, this is wickedly cool. This was definitely one of my happiest moments over Christmas, so thanks a ton to the RTM team. And if you’re about to suggest that I use the so-called TODO list provided by Google Calendar or one of the Google widgets, forget about it. They don’t even come close to RTM in terms of ease of use or functionality. And with this integration, they’ve just nailed it.

Here’s an overview of the features (from the post linked above):


* Review your tasks for the day
* Add new tasks and edit existing ones
* Easily complete and postpone tasks
* Review your overdue tasks
* Optionally show tasks with no due date
* See where your tasks are located on a map

Happy holidays!