Google dissappoints for the first time
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Well, it’s a bit far fetched to say that I’m dissappointed. But it’s a well known fact that when Google launches something new web geeks and early adopters jump on it like it’s pure gold or the sweetest candy or whatever turns you on. It’s been exactly like this two days ago when they rolled out Google Analytics. Only that it’s been a bit more complicated this time as they weren’t able to toy around with a Beta version which they could just throw out and if something breaks they would say: well, it’s a beta, what do you expect? Nope. This time they were inheriting a base of Urchin customers which were paying $200 per month for the service they started offering for free from one day to another.
OK. So Monday I jumped on the bandwagon as soon as I saw the link for the service. Created a profile for drumandbass.ro, put the code on the pages, validated them, it said it’s OK. Tadaaa! The 12 hour waiting period for the first reports started (that’s what they were stating on the setup pages - report data will be available in 12 hours). After more than 12 hours (next morning actually) seeing there’s no data I started reloading the stats page quite impatiently. Nothing. Nothing. And more nothing. Sometimes I wasn’t able to access the service at all. Now almost 48 hours later and still no report data I thought I’ll look around the blogosphere to see if I’m the only one experiencing problems. And to my surprise visiting the trackback links right from the official blog post about the service I started seeing very negative comments. Of course the most dissappointed are the folks who used to pay for the service while it was still branded Urchin and who are now missing out 2 days of reports. But others are quite pissed too.
Many would say that I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and they’d be mostly right, but we are so used to being spoiled by Google. We were used to get quality services for free (any complaints about Gmail, anyone?). Which was not the case this time, at least not right from the start. Too bad. Too bad indeed.
In the meantime I’m still waiting for those first reports…
UPDATE: Hahaha. Just my luck. The moment I published this entry the reports showed up.