Google Doesn’t Love Me Anymore

Disclaimer: this is more of a rant than anything.

Google has a history of releasing new features to a small number of users, and then rolling it out to more as time goes by. As an early adopter of their products it becomes frustrating when I don’t get these new features as they are released. I often don’t get them for a long time after the initial rollout.

An example is Web Clips, which allow you to read news headlines and other information from RSS feeds at the top of your emails. My parents received the feature before I did. Though in this case, when I did get the feature I was unimpressed and bothered by it. I quickly disabled it and have never given it a second thought.

What caused this post is the new Gmail feature of being able to send Google Talk messages to your contacts from within the web-based Gmail client. I was so excited by the chat histories, and more importantly being able to send messages from within Gmail. It seems like just about ever other blogger who posts about Google has the feature. Philipphas it, Nathan has it, Miel has it. And yet I don’t. Friends of mine who I had to spend months convincing to use Gmail even have it. And yet I don’t.

Where is the love? Is it because I don’t like Google Reader? Is it because I block your ads on all Google.com searches (which started as a protest when they only had candy canes and no candles next to the ads during the holidays)? You have all my information, the least you could do is give me this one little feature.

P.S. Sometimes I enable ads as they actually can be more useful than actual search results in some instances.

Update (2/13/06): 5 days later and I finally gained access to Google Talk from within Gmail. And now I’m happy. Though it’s a shame it doesn’t work on the secure version of Gmail that uses https.