Philipp posts about Wouter Schut, who decided that if Google was going to do such a poor job responding to users who send them emails about bugs and suggestions, he was going to create a public bug tracking database himself.
While no doubt Google has an internal bug tracking system that mere mortals will never get to see, I think it is safe to assume that it:
- Is decentralized and divided up by project, with zero collaborative abilities, just like almost everything Google does, or
- It is gigantic, filled with so many bugs (from all the many things Google does) that it is becoming a giant pain, or
- Google is infallible. There are no bugs.
Either way, this is a good method for the public to keep track of the stuff that matters to us, the bugs that we face on a daily basis. The tracker lets users “star” bugs, just like in Gmail, which in turn can lead to a Digg-like accounting of the top bugs eventually. If this becomes mature enough, Googlers can rely on it to understand which bugs are most important to its users, not just its coders.
Here’s a bit of irony: Wouter built the whole thing on the Google Code platform, making an end-run around Google using a Google service. This also means it should be relatively easy to build copy such systems for any company, not just Google.
So far there are 33 bugs Well, now 34. I just submitted that one. A little pet peeve of mine.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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