Product Ideas 2.0 has launched - new features, more products

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 | 9:18 AM

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The Product Ideas team has been very busy lately, and you've probably noticed some changes on the Product Ideas page in the past week that we're very excited to tell you about. Since we launched Product Ideas, we've received a lot of feedback about Google mobile products, Blogger, and Webmaster Tools, and we've identified a lot of ways to better gather your ideas. Now, with our new series for iGoogle, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Sketchup, Google Ad Planner, and Google Custom Search, we're excited to officially unveil version 2 of Product Ideas.

In this new version, we've added several features to keep the ideas list fresh, and to help you better categorize, sort, and filter to find the most relevant ideas for you to vote on. At the top of every idea list, you'll see four ways to sort:

* Top Voted - sort ideas in a topic by the total number of positive votes
* What's Hot - sort by the most popular ideas right now
* What's New - see the most recently submitted ideas
* Ideas in Action - will show you the ideas that we've reviewed and responded to, so you can see how your feedback has helped us make Google products better

In addition, you can now submit an idea into multiple topics. For instance, if you have a great Google Spreadsheets feature request that's relevant to educational use, you can now choose both "Feature Request" and "Education" in the "Pick a Topic" selection box.

The best part is, we're only getting started. Now it's time for you to share your thoughts and tell us what ideas matter most.

55 comments:

Unknown said...

this is soo cool

Jerry Mills said...

It would be nice if it worked! "Try your request later" on my first attempt. Maybe I will, maybe not...

Anonymous said...

I know it's odd to leave a feature request about Google Product Ideas. I feel like I'm tempting the universe to collapse on itself.

Can it be possible to setup RSS feeds for new ideas that can be voted on directly from Google Reader? I think that would lead to a lot more suggestions.

PS -- I'm surprised to see the turing test to leave a comment not be reCaptcha.

Karthik H. Raju said...

Guys, please improve Google Bookmarks... there is an export option, but no import feature!!!

Unknown said...

Product Ideas for Google Finance? Why not just go whole hog and have a Product Ideas for every Google product?

Cristi said...

Ideas for Google Mail, please? Thank you!

Matt said...

Please allow us to post comments on the ideas. Some ideas can be implemented using other tools, some would benefit from people exchanging their thoughts on the idea, and others may already be features but the author didn't realize it!

LMan said...

This Product Ideas 2.0 service is not working correctly. I have attempted several times to leave an idea of mine, and it keeps telling me that my idea is similar to other peoples' ideas when it has nothing to do with it. Please allow the user to select that it is not similar to the ones shown.

Unknown said...

You should have "Product Ideas for Product Ideas"!
One idea I think you should investigate, it to allow to merge ideas. As a user, I searched for something and found plenty of duplicates. I could have just suggested to merge them. There should be a way to do that ...

Chris said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

Chris said...

Product Ideas API around the corner? A robust community insights platform like this one is sorely needed by many!

SNH said...

How about starting a google products ideas page for the connecting element: Google contacts (contacts.google.com). Contact management is becoming more and more important across products (e.g. Google Wave, reader, groups, mail, sync)

Bruce Westfall said...

How about for "SIMILAR" ideas, we are allowed to click an X marking it as NOT similar. VERY frustrating!!

Andy said...

I just began using Product Ideas for Google Wave and noticed that the product idea search feature is somewhat limited-- It doesn't seem to support stemming of query / document terms, so a search for "blog" doesn't return results containing only "blogging", etc.

Improving the search function here would likely ease the issue of duplicate idea submissions.

Artem Pereverzev said...

Need room for product ideas for Calendar and Gmail.

Peter said...

Dear Google, I've been developing Web pages, now in my fourth year, based on 3800 x 3000 pixel page layout. The experience is so positive in content management, I'm still hoping someone on the Web will notice. Your Apps side-by-side, iGoogle and features, the idea just works. Make it an obvious option to see if people will switch over. The Web experience is just that much more pleasing because response to content changes amazingly. Hope you will give it chance. Thank you.

Matt said...

Another plea - let us add comments to items! Otherwise what we have now is just a random collection of thoughts thrown out. Allowing for some collaboration would allow the community to shape, improve, and refine the list, making it even more useful to the product developers. As a developer, I know that the random musings of the public can be less than helpful. Ideas that are discussed, revised, re-rated, and polished are much more useful!

Peter Stindberg said...

Whenever I try to submit an idea, I get a "Error parsing response" message, and the idea does not show up.

Anonymous said...

I really hope that this mode helps google meet market demand as it has TOTALLY MISSED IT with the Symbian OS

chrispeterson said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

chrispeterson said...

every time I submit an idea, I get an 'error parsing response' error. such is the case in explorer, firefox, and safari.

come on people

Lazypup said...

would be nice if I could even view the ideas! every time i click to view the ideas it goes back to the same page without showing anything! Heres an idea.. get this working first!

kinomusicave said...

I get the message "Error parsing response" :(

Unknown said...

here's my idea, i know you guys have got everything covered as far as browsers go, but what if our plan doesn't cover that? most people have unlimited texting, so you could just send us a quick text if we get a new email! of course it'd be with the users permission, and the whole ring around the rosy that every site has for this kind of thing, but doesn't that make sense? like you're having coffee wondering when you're going to get that email, and your phone buzzes, you check your text message inbox and ding-a-ling-a-ling!!!!! your email is here! now all you've got to do is go to the nearest computer, and check it out! vwala!

ArindamSarkar said...

Allow us to choose a different password for Adsense/Adwords accounts at the very least, if not other services too.

Its not safe putting all your eggs in one basket. I am really concerned about this as I use around 15 google products.

Daniel said...

I also get 'Error parsing response' . Have you ever heard about 'availability'? x-(

gambler17 said...

Enable bookmarks on the toolbar to remain open instead of closing every time one opens another web site

Unknown said...

When new visitors to product ideas land up in the top idea page, they tend to start voting from there. This can shun their attention to the new ideas and mean more votes to the top (read early top) ideas.

The first loading page should have randomly generated ideas in it to be fair. There should be a nice popularity index for the ideas rather than just max # of likes.

JerrySchrader said...

Occasionally when searching under local business, I come across a new set of directories, usually under the more info link, one is for attorneys, one for auto body businesses, etc. I must have missed all of the documentation for this, but I think it is in the maps section maybe? It seems to be a local directory program. Who can tell me more about this?

Shifali Bansal said...

It seems to be a local directory program.used cellphones

kevbayer said...

Give Google Bookmarks an import tool to import your bookmarks from your browser.

Make Blogger more integrated with all the other Google products and match the basic google "feel" more closely.

Unknown said...

"No longer accepting new ideas at this time."

(At the bottom of the SketchUp ideas site)

This is (unintentionally) very funny!

James A Baker said...

But where do you send feedback on the site itself?!

--

Google product ideas should accept submissions ABOUT the Google product ideas site!

Peter said...

I've recommended the larger page layout, 3800 x 3000 pixels supporting better content management, and want everyone, in view future larger displays and better content management to build Web sites based on the large page layout, but its not enough. Changing the World is not easy but I have recently had look at Google Wave and came up with idea of group surfing. Now, larger display or not, a large page layout at every site starts to make sense. Dare to change the World Google and the best with Google Wave.

Anonymous said...

add product ideas for all and evry google product out there...in my opinion thre are some important stuff to be done in some products:
- docs: equal or better than openoffice
- picasa/images/sketchup: buy aviary and integrate them all as googleart package or something
- square: buy wolfram alfa
- dashboard: include every product
- mobile: make blackberry apps 2way synceable with google apps
- friend connect: buy facebook
- Chrome: provide plugins with most used tools used on firefox by webdevelopers
- GoogleOS with a very small linux version (capable of growing if neded with apt-get). forget about 33.6k modems, dot matrix printers and any more than 5yr old device.
- ALL: integrate all tools, make them online usable but offline capable with gears (forget about applications for each OS and mobile OS, use HTML5 and gears).

Release all these in a very synced way and bye bye MSFT...or anyone.

Артем Неганов said...

Cool, but where is Product Ideas on Google Chrome / Chromium ?

Michael said...

The opportunity to provide suggestions for Google Products is incredible. I would love to see the following improvements to the website/process:
1) submitter-selectable, Google-refineable parent categorization/tagging of idea submissions for List of Parent Categories/Tags
2) a up-to-date list of Google Products currently accepting product idea suggestions (with links for submittals) with sortable rankings by (A) total number of submitted suggestions and (B) ranked total votes received by per parent category/tag and idea
3) list of petitioned Google Products pending acceptance (NOT yet open for acceptance of product suggestion submissions)
ranked (by volumes of requests / votes )
4) an improved review/voting interface for summarizing idea submissions by Product (what potential idea voter will "wade" beyond more than the first couple hundred ideas at most, many overlapping/redundant, to vote on their preferences). Something like a drillable TreeMap interface (see example http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/ also http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/) which would help to indicate and "bubble up" relative volumes of idea submission and preference voting interest levels with better visualization of the submitted product ideas (by related parent categories/tags, examples: Cosmetic/User Interface suggestion, new/changed logic, cross-product integration, etc. )into which voters could drill to vote based on their interest(s)

Dwight (Monty) Stegall said...

Yeah I would love to see a product ideas page for Chrome and Chromium.

. said...

product ideas for all google products: chrome, wave, books, frame, toolbar, gears, picasa, orkut, gmail, contacts, calendar, android, chrome os (when it is launched), etc...

Lorgen Shadoufang said...

Hnh... I'm also getting the "Error parsing response" message, and I'm using Google Chrome.
A browser restart doesn't correct it, nor a logout-login on my Google account.

Lord Bharath Bhushan Lohray. said...

I changed 3 browsers across 3 operating systems across 3 computers and 2 ISPs and still had the same "Error Parsing Response"

ebinrock said...

I didn't see anything on the Product Ideas page for Chrome, so here it is: How about Print Preview for the Chrome browser?

SPC Mahoney said...

I have been unable to leave these comments because of the poor automated system. These comments are not the same as the others, it can't distinguish. RE:YouTube "I would like for owners of videos to mark 5 comments as their favorites, as things tend to get lost with 2,382 comments. Not the highest rated comments, but the owners favorites." And this next thing applies to Google and Youtube, maybe Yahoo if you guys don't it's a good idea. "After I get a search results page, it gets old having to navigate my mouse down to the tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen to go to the next page. I was wondering if it was possible to make the whole white part of the screen an invisible button to go to the next page. It would have to be a double click button. This would lead to some pretty good stuff if you had a browser that could access this and was set up with voice recognition." SPC Mahoney

Unknown said...

Re: Product Ideas for YouTube

This worked fine the first two times I submitted ideas, but now all I get is a "Error Parsing Response" message when I try to submit.

BTW, here is what I've been trying to submit:

We need more detailed and useful error messaging in the up-loader. My Adobe CS4 encoded MP4 video was rejected as an unrecognized format. My work-around was to use WINFF to compress the original AVI file to MP4.

Unknown said...

I would require from you a type of download manager integrated on google Chrome. I think an option like firefox has where you can close the browser but the downloading continues would be good. If it would increase the downloading speed by finding similar links throught google and continue broken downloads it would be great... Thanks in advance.

Unknown said...

Hey it would be great too if it was possible to integrate TOR(the onion router) in GOOGLE CHROME, and if it would be possible to delete only a single page you want from browsing history .(I mean like Firefox)

Lars Pensjö said...

I think the question for each idea is wrong. It should not be whether the idea is good or bad, it should be whether it is a feature you need.

That is a big difference.

Lorin Rivers said...

There are a TON of duplicate ideas. I bet some would rise in the ranks substantially if they were merged.

Josh said...

Create for the android OS a way to access at home or cloud-based music libraries.The stock music player will be able to sync to any music content that is cloud-based.It should resemble the "dropbox" platform which the player will sync, update & play.

Declan Phillips said...

Google Finance(Beta? idk) Date Button is broken. It should pop up into an area that you are viewing so you can select the date without having to scroll down in the browser. I use Chrome. Thanks Google for making my life better, now all I need to do is make money to use in Google Finance.

Unknown said...

Why is this Product Ideas site not advertised or commented on in the help areas at Google?

I only just stumbled onto it.

Google needs to consolidate the scattered products and services it has, so things are more structured.

François Bacconnet said...

Hello there,

I wasn't able to search in Product Ideas for Google Wave. Any keyword gave no result.
???
And no results w/ web query like: http://www.google.fr/search?num=20&hl=fr&lr=&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=read+only+wave+site:productideas.appspot.com&btnG=Rechercher&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

And I'd like to know how to point (w/ url) to a specific idea, to promote it.

Thx

Unknown said...

I read a lot of personal documents and books, and I really would like to have a bookmark feature. It's something that people who read need! I would've thought that something so obvious like this you'd include from the very beginning, and that there shouldn't be a request, you know?! Thank you so much for the wonderful products/services you've been providing us with...so far.

Cyrill KALITA said...

is there no place for GMail ideas?
Like a tool to "Merge" / "Break Up" mail chains?

Unknown said...

As an experienced Finance Professional, I see gaps in the finance offerings of most major data providers out there including Google. I suggest that Google incorporate ideas from the 'institutional' finance to differentiate their product. I can help, but can't reveal on posts here.