Since Google has been more than just a search engine people have doubted it. Like all things that grow and become extremely popular, the haters seem to come in flocks.
I’ve not had too much of a problem with Google and what they’re doing, as in their expansion and releasing new things all the time. But recently there have been a few issues that started me doubting some of the services. Are they moving forwards too fast?
The first thing i noticed was with sitemaps, although it’s in beta, but what isn’t these days, some irregularities were occurring. The sitemaps system is a great idea and it’s definitely useful, however it seems to randomly display different information, which had me questioning it.
Sitemaps isn’t the real issue however, just the start of my questioning. More recently i received an email about the new spreadsheets service. It looked interesting so i went to the site and requested a signup. An email was then sent to let me know i could access my spreadsheets tryout. The thing is, after logging in all i saw was the same “Try out spreadsheets” form that i saw earlier that i entered my email address into to request a tryout. I’ve revisited since to see if maybe it was an issue that had been fixed, but still the same form and no access to the spreadsheets tryout. What’s the go?
The last thing that instigated the writing of these occurrences was to do with the video service. I stumbled upon one of those funny videos that has crazy stuff happening to people, while viewing it the first time, it seemed fine. The next time i tryed viewing to show a friend it was lagging a lot needing to download more before it could play probably. Not a problem. It was taking a long time to download a short video, but this could have just been my internet connection. For some reason while watching the video Firefox crashed, which could have been a number of reasons why this happened. When i re-opened Firefox, thanks to the Crash Recovery plugin, the tabs i had open where not lost and i was able to start playing the video again. This is where the problem occurred, i had to re-download the whole video again before playing and as was the case earlier, it was taking ages. In another tab i had a quicktime video that i’d viewed the day before and it did not make me re-download it, even after Firefox crashed. What’s the go with Google Video?
For a long time Google has been dominating the market and expanding at a rapid rate, similar to that of Microsoft back in the day. Are the same issues that people have had with Microsoft products going to be experienced with Google products?
On a different note, while i was looking around Google i saw this. SketchUp is a 3D modeling program for Google Maps. I downloaded it and had a play around and it’s very easy to use. You can even download premade models. It will be interesting to see where this goes and what people come up with.
