10 Things on My Google Wish List

Google is an amazing company. I have written quite extensively on the merits of their technologies and platforms. However, as with every corporation, there are improvements that can be made to their product line.

Here are 10 improvements I hope they make:

1. AdSense, AdWords, and Analytics need better integration. Often, there’s a disparity of information between each of these applications. In Analytics, I can see how many users have viewed a specific page, but there is no way to know how many ads were clicked for that article, unless I setup a channel in AdSense or campaign in Analytics. Also, pageviews are not synchronized between AdSense and Analystics. Why can’t this be seamless?
2. AdSense save settings. It’s insane to setup ad units, link units, and referrals just the way you like them, but have nowhere to save your settings — if you want to come back and tweak it later.
3. GMail adds folder-view in addition to conversation-view. While the conversation or discussion view is nice, sometimes, I just want to see the e-mail by itself, without having to see 30 replies grouped together.
4. Google Calendars should be able share with Google Groups. Entering each e-mail address into Google Calendars is a little much, if you just want to share with a list of users that already are in Google Groups.
5. Google Groups user-interface. It doesn’t feel like other, easy-to-use, Google apps. The user-interface is unwieldy and the navigational structure needs improvement. It is in need of major rework to be usable.
6. Google Talk needs to be improved or should be banned. Google should really consider buying Trillian and Adium, instead of improving Google Talk. Both of those instant messaging applications support all major instant messengers including: AOL Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. They are also compatible with IRC, Novell Groupwise Messenger, Apple’s Bonjour, and Jabber (including Google Talk), among others. But if they decide to go it alone and improve their instant messenger, they need to add capabilities such as video conferencing.
7. Orkut integrate with other Google apps. It makes sense that Orkut could have better integration for Google’s other media web applications such as Picasa. In addition, they should integrate with their non-media web applications such as GMail, Google Calendar to make Orkut a useful social network.
8. Picasa becomes better at sharing. I should be able to share my photos with e-mail addresses, Google Groups, Orkut, etc. This would make sense if Picasa were a web application (using Google Gears). Why isn’t Picasa a web application? It should be as easy to use as Yahoo’s Flickr.
9. Google Video redirects to YouTube. Why have both?
10. YouTube filters out the junk. YouTube is too easily gamed. There are too many deceptive videos on the front pages, where the video clips do not match their descriptions. The voting system needs to be improved so that if a video does not match the description, users can vote it off.