...I ask what Google can do for me!
Last week I described what I think Google could learn from salesforce.com, namely how to better handle change management for their third-party developers. But since I'll be at the Googleplex tomorrow meeting privately with Larry, Sergey, and Erik lost in the teeming masses, I thought I'd collect my thoughts on what else I believe Google could be doing better.
Here are the first three that come to mind, in no particular order:
- Integrate Google Groups membership into the permissions system for Apps
Someone has already gone to the trouble of creating a Google Group for the Enterprise Irregulars, but if I want to privately share a Google Calendar with those people I have to re-enter all 50-odd email addresses. - Allow me to paste multi-line addresses into Maps
Most addresses are formatted on multiple lines but if one cuts and pastes them into the search box on Google Maps, only the first line gets pasted. - Let me sort emails by size in Gmail
My Gmail account is almost full. I know I have hundreds of emails with attachments I could get rid of. If I could sort by size, I could free up hundreds of megs in seconds. Right now I have to hunt page by page looking for attachments.
But all of these gripes are from a user perspective. Tomorrow's event is all about developers. So as a developer, here's what I'd like most to see:
- Gmail API
Just let me create, read, update, and delete contacts from my contact list. I want it. My customers want it. My iPhone needs it. :-) - Better error messages
Some of the error messages returned by the GData API can be misleading, uninformative, or even incorrect. Some even contain HTML markup, which isn't optimal. - Relaxed rate limiting
We make a fair number of API calls every day, and spend most of our time waiting for a response from Google. I assume there's some pretty serious rate limiting going on, which I'd love to see relaxed. Of course, if batch operations were implemented for the Calendar API I wouldn't care about rate limits, but one can only ask for so much. :-) - PayPal-compatible integration for Google Checkout
Like a lot of developers, I've integrated PayPal into my payment process. I'd like to be able to use Google Checkout if for no other reason than it accepts payment from countries PayPal doesn't. But I don't want to completely rewrite my payment integration code. If Google Checkout were plug-compatible with PayPal, I'd add it as an option.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of what I'd like to see from Google, rather just a random assortment of things that popped into my head when I started writing. I'd be interested to know what's on the wish lists of other Google users and developers.

Lifehacker just posted a hack for your Google Maps multi-line paste issue.
http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox-tip/paste-multiple-lines-to-input-boxes-266870.php
Posted by: Scott Hemmeter | June 07, 2007 at 03:42 PM
Cool hack... yay! Firefox only... boo! Safari forever!
:-)
c
Posted by: Charlie Wood | June 07, 2007 at 03:50 PM