GPC team finally replies to user request

Some time ago I complained about the missing possibility in Google Page Creator to delete a created site. A lot of people complained about it on the official GPC Group without any reaction from the part of the Google Page Creator team.
Now, after a user started a petition requesting the feature of deleting a site, the GPC team finally replied:

The ability to delete sites is something we already have on user
suggested features list to consider. It's gonna depend on how we feel
about it, and the potential ramifications of allowing this to be used
(security, potential for abuse, etc..). There is no need to start a
petition, but if you really feel compelled to do so, be my guest,
although I must ask that you quit posting this in every section.

Mike
Google Page Creator Guide

Just for personal interest I started to do a little (very informal) statistic about the responsiveness of the following teams: Gmail, Google Reader, Google Page Creator and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. As I mentioned I did this very informally by just counting the total number of posts in each of the corresponding Google Groups. I evaluated the responsiveness of each team just by counting the amount of posts the "Gmail Guide" or "Google Docs & Spreadsheets Guide 1 and 2" did. The numbers clearly cannot be taken as absolutes since I may have missed some posts, but I think it reflects the general behavior of each of the groups. Another thing is that I didn't consider all the different group blogs. To have a full vision, one would also have to take a look at the activity of the corresponding blogs, where the different teams continuously give comments about released features and about those, they are working on.

Overview of different team responsiveness



Gmail Team
Group URL: [click]

Team Posts: 201
Total Posts: 363,992

The diagram is basically non-sense since the low number of 201 (~0.06%) posts over a total of 363,992 is not even shown.







Google Reader Team
Group URL: [click]

Team Posts: 650
Total Posts: 16,241









Google Page Creator Team
Group URL: [click]

Team Posts: 291
Total Posts: 32,537










Google Docs & Spreads. Team
Group URL: [click]

Team Posts: 1,034
Total Posts: 32,903



According to the diagrams above, Google Labs Reader "wins the race" since it has the most posts related to its size. About ~4% of the total posts are from the Google Reader team. Anyway I have to put a note here: By Google Reader Team I intend Mihai Parparita, one of the Google Reader Engineers, which invests a lot in replying to the user community.
However, the team that impresses most in terms of responsiveness is the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team. They invest a lot of their effort in keeping their user community happy by replying to posts or just giving notes about the current development and/or new features. They often also directly ask the community for their opinion regarding some newly implemented features such as the new layout of GDocs they recently released for the public. I like their way, they are communicating with the users. In this way they can ensure to go into the right direction and to keep their users happy which on the other side results in great success for the whole project.

Another aspect of my little "statistic" is that the size of the different groups. Clearly with an increase in size it takes much more effort to review all the posts and even more to reply to them...Considering for instance the 9 people large Google Reader team, reviewing and managing all the posts becomes quite a lot of effort although their Google Group is comparably small.
This is also a possible explanation for the low response rate of the Gmail team which has a total of 363,992.
The following diagrams shows the sizes measured by the total number of posts on each group:

Generally I think that the feedback from users is extremely important. It gives the necessary feedback to be sure the project evolves in the right direction. That's maybe also why Google in general tries to have a large and active user community.
From the side of the user (especially as a software developer as in my case) it is also nice to see that you can (in some way) influence the development, by giving feedback about features and by sending bug reports.

Huge update to GDocs interface

Google has done a huge update to the main Google Docs user interface. One of the major changes was to add support for "folders" which allows for better management of all the different documents. Before they had some kind of tagging system similar to the labels in Gmail. The new solution now works much better, also because people are more used to the organization with folders than with tags or labels. For assigning new documents to folders you can just drag and drop them to the desired location (see pic below). This implementation is very nice and it once again shows the extreme capabilities Google is able to take out of their Ajax technology. In this way their applications are much more responsive, especially if you're sitting in front of a PC with a low-speed Internet connection (as I am :D ).
I think the new layout is one of the preparations of the launch of Google's Presentation Service
It also seems to me that the new layout of GDocs became more similar to "Microsoft-like" layouts such as Windows Live Mail or Outlook Web Access, with a navigation bar on the left and also with the special effects when moving the mouse over the buttons. But still it is intuitive and easy to overlook.


Why use such "online office systems"? It's just for playing around but nothing productive!
I think that is one of the most statements users give. I personally used such services very rarely till now, also because you don't need it just for yourself. Intuitively you will use your local hard disk to save your documents etc...The point is that services like GDocs may only be useful if you have data that you want to share with other people. Assume you're working on a project where more people are working on different things. In such a case GDocs may be useful, also because the usual versioning systems like Subversion or CVS are more for text-files and source-files (which are basically text-files) as for rich text documents. In such situation it may be the right moment to use online office systems.

Feature suggestions
Recently, when I started to set-up some documents on GDocs in preparation for a project I'm doing, I noticed that an extremely nice feature or better feature update would be to have the possibility of sharing entire folders or at least multiple files at the same time. The idea would be to have a folder which is shared with more people and every document which is put inside that folder, will be automatically shared with all of them. That would be much more useful than only being able to share document by document.

More details

• Official Google Docs & Spreadsheets blog
  

How to close Safari 3 for Win?? It's easy, just add a bookmark!

Why that?? Simply because adding (or better trying to add) a bookmark will result in a total crash of the browser. I mean...ok...it is just a beta release and not really considered for the end-user, but the amount of crashes you experience are even too much for a beta version. I just updated to version 3.0.1 and yes, now you can search via Google (before that ended in a crash).

No, apart joking....what is a real plus for them is usually the overall appearance regarding styles, special effects (see picture on right) and so on...basically the things for which Apple is known. I also cannot really confirm Apple's claim of Safari being the fastest available browser. It is faster than IE 7...ok :) but comparing it with Firefox I didn't notice any big improvement in speed...it's more or less the same, but I wonder if this will change with the first end-user version. Meanwhile, the most used feature will be "Safari's bug report"....if it works... :D

"Street View" on Google Maps

Google Maps has now a new feature, the "Street View".

Street View gives you navigable 360-degree street-level imagery in
Google Maps for selected cities. You can see images for a spot and
take virtual walks along that street. So when you're trying to find
the perfect outdoor cafe for lunch with friends or want a glimpse of
the neighborhood you're considering moving to, use Google Maps to see
what the spot actually looks like, as if you were right there in
person.

The feature is really cool, although at the moment it is only available in these cities:
San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.

Just open Google Maps and navigate to one of the above cities. The there should be a button called "Street View". When you click on it, you will see a little figure appear on the map which you can move around to different locations in the city and explore the streets.
Here a sample of Miami I made:
The appearing image in the balloon can be dragged around and zoomed in as usual on Google Maps, really as if you would stand there.
You can try it out, by clicking on this link, a location on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.