ManyMoon and Google Apps Marketplace Disappoint
For the past month or so we’ve been using Manymoon for our project management collaboration. There’s a free version though I paid the $180 or so for a yearly subscription (which is starting to look like a mistake). Overall, when it works, it’s a great little tool for it’s tight integration to Google Apps which we use for our internal email, calendar and documents.
Sadly for the past several days the Manymoon service has been largely unreachable for me. I’ve left support a problem report but have yet to hear back from them on what the issue with their service is.
When it is reachable there tends to be an error message related to SSL connection failures or the speed is unbearably slow. This is a big issue for Google as well because ManyMoon is listed as one of the top installed Google Marketplace Apps! The marketplace is a relatively new location for Google to showcase new Software As A Service (SAAS) applications that integrate tightly with Google Apps.
When Google Marketplace first arrived I was hopeful that there would be lots of applications that could be purchased and integrated to my Google Apps account in a manner similar to how applications are purchased and used on an iPhone or Android device.
Sadly for me that hasn’t happened. Instead what I have experienced is what to me seem half-baked products that tend to partly work.
For example, an earlier experiment with using Kwaga, which purports to “displays profile information from the social web.” resulted in an incoming email from someone who I knew (luckily) where Kwaga completely mis-identified the person’s picture, web site, social media sites. Emails to the developer uncovered that this was pretty much a known issue.
Sigh. If an application whose primary purpose is to identify your social contacts – fails or is only sometimes correct- what good is it?
Thinking of the Google Apps Marketplace? My recommendation is to stick to the freebies until you’re able to see the applications that charge a fee are stable and in business for the long haul.
Update 7/15/2010: Just spoke with the Manymoon folks. They’re taking steps to ensure this issue doesn’t recur. They have a blog post that explains what happened here and future updates will also be posted to their blog to keep everyone posted. We continue to use Manymoon to manage our projects and will keep you posted with our experiences.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.


