Google Dashboard: Trivia tabulator for my Google life

Using many different Google applications is like working with a crossword puzzle. All of the pieces are there, but how they all fit together is a mystery.

Google took a stab fixing this with the Google Dashboard. It's a bit of a piecemeal effort. The dashboard itself is really an activity monitor for your Google life. It doesn't really show you what Google knows about you, nor does it show you all of the data you have created and stored with Google's many services - for that you must go into each service. Instead, it shows you at a glance most (but not all) of the Google applications you may be using and what your latest activity has been. It is simply a summarizer, or tabulator, of arbitrarily chosen activity statistics. You must go into each service to get details.

As Barbara Krasnoff notes in her blog, the information is interesting, but not always useful. Much of the data is very cursory, offering up summaries of things like total documents created or what your last appointment was. As such, much of it is just interesting trivia (total calls placed on Google Voice, total number of Google Reader subscriptions). But it can also be useful. For example, the dashboard alerted me to the fact that Barbara is a "fan" of my Picasa Web Albums page. Now I just have to figure out what a fan is, and what she has access to.

If you use Web Albums, you probably know that the default is to make every album public. It's easy to upload photos and forget to check that little box that makes them private. The dashboard will tell you how many public albums you have. In my case I shouldn't have any public albums, so I can tell at a glance that something is amiss. But if you have a mix, you'll still need to go into Picasa to see which ones are public and which are not.

Where's my dashboard?

Accessing the dashboard in the context of your everyday use of Google's applications can also be confusing.

Like many people, my primary experience with Google is through Gmail. From there I can see and navigate to my other Google applications, which appear at the top of the screen. But try to find the Google Dashboard and you'll find that you can't get there from here.

"It's not actually a discrete product, per se. It's more of a feature for your Google Account," a spokesperson explains. Unfortunately, you can't get to the Google Account from Gmail either. In place of the My Account link you'll only find the Settings link for configuring Gmail. Same with Google Calendar. But you will find a My Account link in Web Albums and in the Dashboard. Go figure.

So you probably need to bookmark Google Accounts as another entry point into the Googleplex. Then, to view the Dashboard you click on the "View data stored with this account" hot link on the Google Accounts home page. Or you can bookmark that too.

Missing link

Unfortunately, the dashboard has another blind spot: Ad Preferences settings. While the Dashboard provides a summary of the data you've created and your activity on Google services, it doesn't provide access to the privacy controls that determine how Google can use the information stored on its servers.

For this you need to go back to that Google Accounts page. But you won't find a direct link to the ad preferences controls there either. Way down at the bottom of the page, below the Personal Settings, Profile, and My Products icon sets, in what looks like footer text after the Google copyright notice, lies the Privacy Policy hot link. Clicking on that takes you to the Privacy Center page, which in turn includes a link to the Google Ads Preferences Page, where you can specify your interests or opt out of Google's interest-based advertising. The tool is there for those who can find it.

Somehow all of this needs to be pulled together in a more coherent whole. Google Dashboard is a nice gesture, but it needs to present more useful information. And it needs to adopt a holistic, data-centric view that helps me understand all aspects of what's happening to the data I have entrusted to Google's management.