Alex Little

Like many people, I’ve been gradually moving towards using web based apps and keeping my data ‘in the cloud’ (e.g. GMail, Remember The Milk, Google Docs etc). This is despite the occasional report of problems, such as having your GMail account deleted – I’ve basically been thinking that this would never happen to me.

Well, you may have seen my posting the other day about being banned from Google Groups. This is still unresolved – despite sending a number of emails to Google support – and has made me much more wary about my ongoing usage of these types of services.

I do realise that these are ‘free’ services (though Google does generate huge profits) , so maybe shouldn’t expect too much, but I would at least expect to have received notification that I was being banned and the reasoning behind it – as far as I know I’ve not knowingly done anything wrong. I appear to be blocked from accessing all Google Groups using my GMail account – including groups I’ve never visited before – which is contrary to the message I receive which says that the group administrator has blocked me.

My main problem with all this is that fact that I am now the administrator of 3 Google Groups which I am unable to access (and I’m the only administrator for each) – so now I’m unable to prevent other users signing up and posting inappropriate messages.

I wonder how many more times my experience will be repeated for other users before Google does anything about it… but with 08 Q2 profits at $1.25bn they probably won’t care too much.

Have just spotted this posting about the Remember The Milk GMail extension for FireFox, so you can manage your RTM tasks directly from GMail. Looks pretty good (saves having 2 browser windows open), but seems its something else I’ll need to wait for, as you need the most recent version of GMail, which hasn’t yet been rolled out to my account (should note that now I do have the offlline version of Google Docs!). Only thing I’m not too sure about is how it will look on the small screen of my Asus Eee – might just be too much to squeeze onto one page – but will give it  go anyway….