I’ve recently been using Google’s ability to produce your own custom homepage.

This has been wonderful. I’ve been able to add my calendar, my email, my subscribed RSS feeds with Google reader, and lots of other useful tools such as notes, to-do lists, etc. I have a common home page that I can use from both work and home that contains the up-to-date information that I want.

Or so I thought….

Somewhere around lunchtime today it all went pear shaped. The homepage reverted back to some version that I had played with a few months ago. Gone was all the useful information.

Thinking that I had done something stupid, or that there was a bug in our web filtering proxy (that the company I work for makes), I spent ages trying different things: checking with IE and Firefox, clearing out old cookies, do network traces.

Luckily I stumbled across a post in Google groups suggesting that I was not alone. It seems that a lot of people have experienced the same problem today. The sad thing is that Google (who generally are thought of as “good guys”) have not said a word - no explanation, apology, warning or help on the homepage as far as I can see.

Are we becoming too reliant on these “free” services? How much damage does an insident like this do to our confidence or Google’s reputation? What are the alternatives?

In my hunt for a solution I’ve come across Netvibes. But can I rely on this any more (or less) than Google?

Update: 27th April 2007:  It seems Google is now fixed with no explanation of what went wrong.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 10:41 pm and is filed under computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.