Google Just Won’t Launch What Matters - To Do List

May 12, 2008

I saw the story about Google launching Friend Connect. Cool. Yeah, whatever. My question is when are they going to finally plug the gaping hole in their Google Apps package: the to do list.

I am a Google whore. I love the company’s products. They are generally well executed. But, it just floors me that they haven’t yet released a todo list application to integrate with Gmail and Calendar. To me, this is just one of those “DUH” things.

There has been talk about it. According to a story on ZDNet several months ago, Google has even addressed it:

Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to- do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to- do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient - we’ll have more to talk about soon.

Google secret sauce? They don’t need to rule the world with this thing. Just put something up there. Right now, I am using Remember The Milk and using their Firefox plug-in to embed it into Gmail. It works, but it sucks that I have to use another service. And if I’m on another computer, my todo list is no longer embedded into Gmail because I don’t have the extension.

I know this has been talked about before, but that proves my point. What is taking so long?

Perhaps I shouldn’t bitch about not getting something I’m not paying for. At the same time, though, it shouldn’t take this long to create a todo list app - special sauce or not.