The GoogleBots seem to read the site more than their help desk….

I have now gone through the password reset process twice, to no avail. Here’s why it’s ineffective:

If someone has access to my account, they came through YOUR servers — MY network logs indicate no unauthorized or malicious activity. Sending me stupid form emails over and over and over again telling me to request that my username be sent to my secondary email address is absurd, since someone HAS CHANGED MY INFORMATION.

So what the HELL do I do with THAT?

Here’s what has me completely pissed off — THERE IS LITERALLY NO WAY TO GET TO A PERSON. Just endless loops of email screens that yield even more useless form emails.

THIS IS SOMETHING A PERSON needs to have a look at.

So either I get something from a PERSON soon in my email or a phone call from a PERSON, or I will begin my own discovery process to see exactly how many people have this problem and how you have managed to f&*k up their data and days. I will start posting threads reporting the problem across the net and I will do everything I can think of to discourage anyone from using GMail, AdSense, or Google in any way, shape or form.

I’m just one blogger, but the power of blogs has always been the single individual joining with others until the voices get very, very loud. Don’t be resting on your stock price, Google…because if enough people have this kind of experience you will be the latest Web 1.0/2.0 flash in the pan — here today, broke tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, hack

Update: Reports of similar problems on Google:

• my gmail account hacked - Most recent addition to this thread was today
• password problem again
• Still no solution?
• Locked out of gmail

Gosh, I hate to sound paranoid, but at 8AM today my GMail account was operational and fine.

At 10 AM today I suddenly cannot access my email because it won’t accept my password. After an extraordinarily frustrating hour of trying to find out why I cannot access my account (and when I email for a password refresher I am told there is no account with my reported secondary email?), I have reported a security breach to Google.

I’m not the only one. There are several reports of similar problems in Google groups.

Now, it could just be a weird outage on their side…(though I was able to log into all over family members’ gmail accounts just fine). Or not.

Anyone seeing reports of issues with Gmail? Leave a comment…because even paranoids have real enemies.

Technorati Tags: gmail, hacked, google

With the rollout of Google Calendar (GCal) today, I thought it would be a good time to post that calendar update that I’d been promising.

In my first review, I had compared Planzo,, Spongecell and 30Boxes. All had strengths, but 30Boxes was the clear winner because it had more of them. The only thing missing was the ability to receive reminders via SMS.

The 3 Contenders

• Spongecell: This would be a great calendar for someone who centers their lives on a mobile device. It works much better as an application used from a cell phone or PDA than it does from the web TO a mobile device or RSS feed. To their credit, however, after my first review I received an invitation to try their private RSS feed beta, which I did. However, the feed didn’t send through enough information for it to be useful.

  I also asked Dancergirl to try it, figuring that she would be a good representation of an “average” adult user — someone who understands calendars but is relatively new to the idea of SMS messaging or RSS feeds. She gave up on it as too complicated and hard to figure out. When I pressed her on it, she said that when she used the “easy entry” it didn’t go in as she expected. This is a problem with all of them, but evidently Spongecell doesn’t think like Dancergirl.

• Planzo: I don’t especially like Planzo’s interface. It’s a busy layout and seems to be trying to appeal to MySpace-rs. It does have the ability to customize the color scheme and religiously emails the schedule daily. Email is my least favorite way to receive calendar notifications, though, so that doesn’t impress. It does have a notebook and ToDo list integrated into it. However, they’re not on the same page as the default calendar view, which means three clicks to see something I like all on one page.
• 30Boxes: Since I last wrote about 30 Boxes, they’ve added all of the features that I wanted. The SMS notification feature is completely reliable — I receive my notifications at the exact time that I specify. My only wish for them is that they’d include the notes I put on the calendar, because those notes generally have a contact phone in the entry so that I can confirm or call in when it’s a phone meeting.

  The sharing options are complete. I added the RSS feed to my Google start page and set it as my home page. Whenever I start up my browser my 30Boxes calendar is right there listing the next five appointments I have.

  Since using 30Boxes, the only appointment I have missed is one that I used Outlook to notify me about. Had I added it to 30Boxes, I’d have been present and accounted for, even at an ungodly hour (for me, anyway).

  Dancergirl and T have also set up 30Boxes calendars at my request. Dancergirl loves hers. Sticks hasn’t had time to make his yet, but he will — that’s his “next weekend” project. I’ve also added one to the band website and placed the generated code on the sidebar so that the events are automatically updated on the site. That worked so well that I created one for the church, too, and the dance school will also be done this month. All of these calendars can be shared with my calendar so that I see an overview of all events/classes/appointments on one page and can add those feeds to my Google calendar.

The final verdict

30boxes wins, hands down. Every feature I want in a calendar is there. The automatic Google Maps and linking features are just gravy — everything else is neatly contained in one nice pretty package. It is a powerful tool to keep busy lives as organized as possible, and flexible enough to share or keep private, depending upon your preferences.

Why try Google Calendar?

I set up Google Calendar tonight because I use GMail and was curious to see how the two would mesh together. Of all the Google apps, GMail is one that I could not live without, no matter what. GTalk is rapidly becoming another one with the fattening of AIM and all the stupid ad/video/audio stuff they have attached to their client. I like Google stuff because it’s generally very lean and mean.

Google calendar is nice. It’s got all of the features that 30Boxes has. There is a feature to add comments to entries, which would be handy for keeping notes on phone meetings or online discussions. It will also recognize appointment info in GMail and provide an “Add to GCal” button. But that’s about it.

It does have the ability to pull in other web calendars, but when I tried to grab the feed from 30Boxes, it returned an error. Since there’s no problem with any of the other feeds, I’m assuming the problem is on Google’s end and involves the fact that the only format it will currently import is the iCal format (which 30 Boxes does provide). Since it’s brand-new, I’m willing to give that a shot again later.

If you choose to share your calendar, it becomes nakedly public, and part of Google search. No thanks to that, but if you’re an organization where that is desirable, it could be a plus.

My verdict: I’ll use GCal to do a quickview of my 30Boxes calendar feed when it works, but don’t plan to migrate everything to Google Calendar at this point — 30Boxes is too reliable and easy to use to make the switch and Google hasn’t given me a compelling reason to do it.

Technorati Tags: calendar, review, gcal, google calendar, spongecell, 30boxes, planzo

Update: I was able to import my 30Boxes Calendar by creating a .csv file and importing it into GCal. An inelegant solution, but one that worked as a temporary fix. An XML/RSS feed into GCal would be a better way.

Since I posted my shoutout about calendars online, I’ve had the chance to try out a few more.

I started with Spongecell. There’s a lot to like about it, including the ability to use my cell phone to “sponge” my appointments for the day or week via SMS. I also liked how easy it was to enter events, and that they could be done via my cellphone or the internet. However, the RSS feed didn’t work for me — it would give me a feed but didn’t have my entries on it, so each day was blank. To me, getting this stuff via RSS is one of the major reasons to use a web-based calendar rather than Outlook. I played around with the feed but ultimately just wasn’t getting enough joy to keep going with it. I also really need a way to color-code entries which wasn’t available to me.

Sneadwoman suggested 30Boxes the other day and I vaguely remember reading about it on Techcrunch and Robert Scoble’s blog not long ago. We’d had a discussion about it at work too, but in the context of the discussion it didn’t strike me as something I’d like much.

I WAS WRONG. MEA CULPA. This app is the equivalent of Flickr for calendars. It’s very Ajaxy and Web 2.0, but if this is Web 2.0 then I want more. It is everything I love about Flickr and blogging rolled up into something that seems like it was made for me.

Starting with the data entry: I can enter an appointment in one line and tell it that it’s recurrent. I can tag it and color code it in that same line, so that if I wanted to set a reminder to take dancergirl to class every thursday and have my entry appear in green AND tag it so that I could look at all similarly tagged entries, I would type in

“3/2 3:30pm dancergirl class thursday repeat tag dancergirl tag green”

30Boxes would know that I want that entry to repeat every thursday at 3:30 pm and the entry would be green.

Syndication: Dancergirl could subscribe to the ‘dancergirl’ tag via RSS and/or email so that she was able to see the calendar as well. She can have her own calendar that can be mashed up with mine, too, or she can just enter her own stuff into mine. They have code snippets so you can include your info on your Ajax home page if you use one (and I may now have to consider using one to bring together my feeds, gmail and calendar).

This is slick stuff. Anything you want to put on any day (to-dos, memos, notes, whatever) can be there.

You can bring in your Flickr and blog feeds so that one day’s journal entry has everything you might’ve posted to those along with your calendar all in one place.

The only thing that is missing from my wish list (and this is in development) is the SMS capability. It looks like they’re getting close with it — there are preferences to set cellphone number and provider so it’s probably not too far away from reality.

I would pay for this, for the same reasons that I have a paid Flickr account. A great product deserves to be supported. If the price is reasonable (and I’d assume this would fall somewhere in the Flickr price range), it’s worth paying purely to support the developers. They’re publishing an API so that other cool inventions can be made with it.

I don’t often rave about web apps, but this one gets five stars from me as it is, and if other cool uses come out of it the way the Flickr world has evolved, it will be one of my killer apps for the year. I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: 30boxes, calendar, ajax, web2.0, spongecell, techcrunch, robert scoble

I love GMail, but I hate not having my calendar at my fingertips like I did with Outlook. Since I’ve made the switch to GMail for all of my different email accounts I’ve been really disorganized about appointments and schedules, and it’s all slamming together.

We just discovered this week that Sticks has two gigs at the same time on the same day — one in Goleta and one in San Diego. Obviously this is a problem for him. Now I know he should be managing his own calendar but since one of us still has to drive him it needs to be a group effort. Oh, and did I mention that Dancergirl also has a competition in Glendale on the same day?

This calendaring thing (or lack thereof) is out of control. I’ve been playing with some of the so-called Web 2.0 stuff, thinking that the group aspects would be handy. I started with Planzo calendar and it’s okay. I like getting my calendar via email and/or RSS for sure. What I don’t like is that there’s no way for me to color-code what ‘event’ belongs to who. It’s limited at this point to a “work” category.

Verizon recently partnered up with Yahoo!, so I figured maybe I’d try the Yahoo! calendar, too. It’s also okay, but no RSS feed which is really convenient to have. Still, I can get notices via SMS to my cell phone as well as email and if I used yahoo! messenger it would send it to that as well.

The thing is, none of them have all of what I want. Some are almost there, but are still missing key features. Outlook was the closest I ever got, but I’m trying to use a web-based app so that: 1) I can access it from the office or home computers without synching; and 2) I can get automatic notifications.

My ideal calendar would include being able to drag and drop emails onto it to link up email with appointments, being able to easily enter lots of dates and times — I could make an Excel spreadsheet or a text file in half the time it takes to enter everything separately (and these aren’t recurring, so I can’t use that feature), having color-coding for categories or people, have an RSS feed as well as SMS notifications and the ability to post appointments via email, like I can blog entries or Flickr photos from my cell phone.

Is there such a thing? If Google could invent that for GMail I’d be hooked. I’d PAY. If you have a favorite online calendar app, post a comment so I can give it a try.

Technorati Tags: calendar, web2.0, organization, planning