The Sinister Moose

 Were you one of the thousands that were frustrated by the Conversation Thread View in Gmail?

Well, the overlords finally listened, even if it was only to prevent frustration among google app users.

I have had a gmail account since the early days of gmail. I like it, it isn't too oppressive and there are many controls and options that it allows for free that I can't really do even on my own servers.

Unfortunately a few months ago, Google introduced a new "feature" to Gmail which rapidly proved to be unwanted and disliked by the masses. Conversation Threading, as it turns out was wildly unpopular, and in several cases confusing and led to potentially libelous situations of forwarding the wrong "group" of emails to the wrong people.

In my case, I have a server that sends me hourly reports on security issues. The emails that are sent, all come with the same subject line, and because of the gmail conversation threading, gmail grouped all of those messages together. From my phone it was impossible to simply open the latest message, without opening the entire conversation "thread", even though the mails were not related except by subject line.

This as you could imagine was damnably frustrating. I was not alone, and quickly a petition was circulated and presented to Google, to at least give users the option of turning off the conversation threading. After several months, and several thousand petioners, Google finally responded. I find it funny that they initially said it was "better" than the old way of viewing messages, and that we would love it, once we got used to it.

No Google. I'm tired of you telling me what's good for me, and what I'll like. Your gmail tinkering will one day cause you to loose all of your subscribers. Go ahead, try to shove some other piece of crap "good for us" thing down our throat.

I have also recently had to use greasemonkey and a blocking script to stop the automatic web preview pop-ups on Google searches, as there is no way to turn this annoying-system-resource-hogging piece-of-shit off otherwise. You may have noticed recently that when you do a Google search, your results will now pop open a preview of the pages listed in your results, by simply holding your mouse over the listing. No Google! Bad Google!

I used Google for it's simplicity. It loaded rapidly, was uncluttered and the serarch results were mostly relavent. Lately, they are becoming less relavent and the search engine it's self is getting more cluttered.

Have you used the Google Image search recently? I have, as I use that feature a lot, however I am going to stop using it, because Google thinks I need to have thumbnail previews that automatically expand when I mouse over them, and that I need to have all of my results on one page, so it takes 15 minutes to load.

Again, Bad Google! No Biscuit!

I am slowly finding some of the same issues with my beloved Motorola Droid X powered by Google's Android Software. There are certain things it will not allow me to do and certain things it forces me into, which I do not like. One of the other annoyances which is directly related to gmail, is that I cannot permanently delete email from my Droid Phone through my gmail account. I can move messages to the trash, but I can't go into the trash and throw out the messages forever. To do that, I have to log into gmail, open the trash folder/label, and select all the messages and delete them forever.

If that isn't inconvenient enough, I have to put up with a snarky comment from some coding asshat at Google, that says, "No messages in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have so much storage?!"

What fucking business is it of yours Google, if I don't like taking up all your damn storage space, with trashed messages? Why do you feel you need to comment on my throwing out the trash, freeing up storage space? I think the use of a question mark followed immediately by an exclamation mark is what really pisses me off with this stupid comment. I know this may sound trivial, and petty, but honestly they might as well have just straight up called me a dumbass for emptying my trash folder.

This leads me to believe there is something more sinister at work here. I get the impression that Google, wants to have access to everything I receive in my email, so they are scolding me for deleting it. That is not cool. After reading the End User License Agreement, I made damn sure I don't use Google Chrome, because anything I type, be it a blog, or an entry on Facebook, legally becomes property of Google. Go ahead and read the EULA, you'll see what I mean.

I do feel that in some small way I had the opportunity to take part in a small victory against the evil overlord that Google has become, by getting rid of that damnable Conversation View, but there are still several things I don't like that have come out of Google and I hope to find ralleying points in order to hopefully jump on other bandwagons to get Google back to what made it so great in the beginning.

With great power comes great responsibility, but also the potential for great corruption and oppressiveness.

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