Why doesn't Google stuff work well together?
I use Google's Blogger service to create this blog. One of Blogger's features is the ability to moderate comments. In order to see the comments, however, you have to click on an arrow next to the comment, and it drops down to reveal the full comment. This works in all my browsers except for Google Chrome. In Chrome, clicking has no effect. I have to open Firefox or IE in order to moderate comments.
Another example is iGoogle. All these third-party gadgets work fine, but the Google Calendar gadget doesn't work at all. I see only a giant error message saying that the URL is too "large." (See the screenshot above.)
Yet another example: For months, some percentage of my Google Alerts messages were being unceremoniously dumped into the Gmail "Spam" folder, as if Google was concerned that Google was a spammer. To fix the problem, I had to create a Filter in Gmail and tell it to "Never send it to spam" when I get e-mail from Google Alerts.
There are probably other examples in my own experience that I can't recall for the moment. What about for you? Have you noticed Google stuff not working well with other Google stuff?
9:24 AM * PERMALINK * 9 comments
Comments:
I've experienced trouble in googlepages using Chrome.
Here's one: The Google Toolbar isn't available for Chrome. So I can't easily use my Google bookmarks in Chrome. That's a showstopper for me, as I rely on Google bookmarks (and its "open in tabs" feature) on my multiple computers and browsers.
My big issue right now with Google is their GMail app for the BlackBerry. It doesn't support html, hyperlinks etc. I can't even click on a link to go to a page to listen to my Google Voice(mail). How hard would it have been to have something as basic as HTML email in their BlackBerry app?
If you use Feedburner, now owned by Google, and want to use the link splicer feature, you can create a daily post of your shared links from delicious, digg, mag.nolia, bloglines, etc. Google Reader's shared items, however, is not an available option.
I have a problem with GMail: the Newsletter from "Windows Secrets" are sent directly to the Trash. Entering Editor@windowssecrets.com among my Contacts didn't solve the problem. Same thing happens with the newsletter from the "Kindle Nation. Emails sent to Gmail did not receive any answer.
Elgan, thanks for your very informative blog.
Franco Duina
I've noticed that Google Reader takes forever to pull my feed in from Feedburner (that's after Feedburner has itself taken forever to pull the feed from the site).
I've not really noticed any compatibility issues between Google's home-brewed products though.
I find Google's terrible interoperability very frustrating. Recently I've been trying to decide if I should move all my Google Bookmarks into Google Reader as "notes," which have all the same features as Google Bookmarks. But I'm worried Google might one day decide to expand the features of GBookmarks and I'll be hosed. Why not just make these two work together, instead of cannibalize each other? Also, why not integrate GBmarks into Chrome?
Oh, and when you have Gmail and iGoogle open in two separate tabs and someone tries to chat with you, the message will appear in the in-focus tab but not the other one.
For a short while I used GMail Nofifier which has two issues. 1.) It only lets you check one of your Gmail accounts (I guess in Google's world one is enough for everybody) 2.) I had it set to check for email every 9 minutes and one day noticed it wasn't working. When I tried to log into that Gmail account via a web browser it displayed a message saying that I had been locked out of the account for violating Google's Terms of Usage. The terms of service are written in standard legalese but the clause that seem to pertain to my case states that accessing Gmail by any means other than a browser is a violation. Thus Gmail's own Notifier software is a violation of their terms of usage. SAY WHAT!!!
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