Google | Blog about business and product management

Last week I was running a test campaign for one of my clients and a full week after I wrapped it up a notice from Google came in stating that some of my ads are out of trademark compliance. The site in question is http://www.americatoystore.com/, the owner is a registered affiliate of McFarlane Toys and Neca (which gives him rights to promote their merchandise using whatever he can find on their web sites). The words in question were NFL and NHL.

Next thing – I open the browser, search for “NHL action figures” or “NFL action figures” and the paid ads are full of “sacred” terms. So my question is – if myself and my client get slap on the wrist and others don’t this means Google’s adherence to its own guidelines and policies is very spotty. I realize that big guys’ money are better then mine, but why don’t Google come out straight about that?

Posted the question on their forums, but I don’t hold my breath.

… but I just found out today that Google’s Gmail has this nifty feature of checking POP3 accounts for you. It doesn’t really matter that it’s been around from other providers for years, and Google’s only made it available to some of the customers (for example I only have it enabled on one out of three of my accounts). What matters is that if you add the ability to send e-mails as from that another account (which is already available) – and you can use Gmail as your full-featured POP3/SMTP e-mail. Given that most of people don’t have 2GB of backlog e-mails anyway – very nice trick. The real breakthrough would be if Google made an import routine to upload old messages preserving dates from e-mail programs, such as Outlook/Outlook Express, TheBat!, ThunderBird and others.

Overall – I’m starting to be more and more taken into whole online-office thing. E-mail client, word processor, spreadsheets – and now talks of Google acquiring ThinkFree, that also has presentation creator – all looks very promising. Obviously, I’m not planning to ditch the Office package, however, I’ll think twice before upgrading to the next version. After all – I don’t have a 2.5GB Excel spreadsheet with all the hedge fund transaction history, as some company I was interviewed at three years ago.