Am I the only one on the planet who has been having “issues” with GMail ever since their GoogleTalk system upgrade? I don’t think I have been able to send out any messages from GMail in over three days, though I’ve been away for much of the last three days, so its tough to know if this has been a continuous, or spotty outage. Archiving messages is broken, and while there are a couple of new messages, its no where near the normal level I would expect.

As I alluded, I’ve been off the grid for much of the last part of this week, so if this is a more wide spread issue, I can only assume folks have been blogging about it. I guess its time to pay Technorati a visit :D

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Update: Hmmm…. If its a system wide issue, there doesn’t seem to be too many people blogging about it, though at this stage of the “Symantic Web” game, its difficult to pin-point the content you are most interested in, as the combination of keywords and full-text search, while fine for non-mainstream subject matter like “XSLT”, doesn’t fly too well when you are searching for “gmail” or “gmail problems” or “problems with gmail”, and while coming up with the exact phrasing that folks are using when speaking about potential gmail problems would obviously help, if we humans are the ones with the problem (in regards to finding what it is we are looking for from a fine-tuned contextual standpoint), we might as well forget about this whole “Semantic Web” business and go back to using newspapers, television, and our local public library to locate information of interest.

As an interesting side-note,

In searching for “gmail problems” (no quotes, though I should probably try it with quotes and see of that helps) I did run across this interesting post from Nik Cubrilovic regarding Kiko. From the body of the post,

One of the problems with talented hackers is they often have too many ideas and not enough execution strength. In all of Paul’s excellent writing about attracting and managing developers with the hacker aptitude he fails to mention the issue of having hackers focus on a single project and task. The big companies and many other startups do a good job of not only attracting and retaining talent but having them focus on getting things done.

Truer words have never been spoken. Well, at least from a blog standpoint. If you include scripture in that comparison, then yes, truer words *HAVE* been spoken. But if not mistaken, that last sentence pretty much just proved the first. ;)

That reminds me… I’ve got this *GREAT* idea! It’s called “shutup and get back to work, M.!” :D

Bye :)
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NOTE: The Paul Nik is referring to is none other than Paul Graham, one of the folks behind the funding of Kiko. He recently spent some time sharing his own feelings as to the reasoning behind the demise of Kiko. Nik’s comments stem from the following quote,

“What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected. Justin and Emmett told me a large fraction of Kiko’s users had Gmail addresses.”

Theres an interesting under current to all of this, as Paul points out a bit further down in his post,

Google may be even more dangerous than Microsoft, because unlike Microsoft it’s the favorite of technically minded users.

While I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from the above (You’re welcome ;-)), combined with the first quoted bit, it does go a long way in showcasing the fact that we, as humans, tend to use that which is easier to access over that in which might be prefered.

Of course simplicity is an important factor as well. The fact that notepad is one of the most commonly used text-editors by hackers and non-hackers alike should be enough to realize my point.

Something to think about, anyway. :)