We put up a post yesterday with a cool table of information about social websites and, because I hate having to scrape stuff off the web, we used google docs to store the information. But that is all we'll use google doc's for - because it has kreppy features and google has, or so it seems, reserved the right to use your "private" documents for whatever they please.

Horrible Lack of Functionality

First the functionality. Let's just say if my options were between Google's spreadsheet and a copy of Lotus-1-2-3 running on an Adds Viewpoint under CPM, I'd probably take Lotus. Yes, their stuff has that little functionality.

For example, some maroon at Google (who I am sure is worth 250x what I am, but never mind that) has breathlessly announced that you can build a web form that saves data in a spreadsheet. No, really. Big News at Google.

Leaving aside that people have been saving web form information to disk for, oh, 10 years ... Excel has been able to create forms since version 0. In 1990.

And don't even get me started on formatting, calculation features.

And a TOS to Bind Them All

But, most importantly, scope this quote from Google Doc's TOS :

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.

I can't tell you what our legal consultant said about that because they might think I was giving legal advice and, frankly, I hate it when they come in my office and slap me around. And then send me a bill.

But I will say that we immediately pulled our important documents off google and started up a wiki behind the firewall. Because while I am sure that some lawyer made them put that in there, it sure reads like they can do what they darn well please ... but not with my document full of account numbers and passwords!