Marissa Mayer On Google's 3 Biggest Mistakes (VIDEO)

Google's Marissa Mayer, VP of geographic and local services and one of the giant's first 20 employees, outlined during an interview with Digg Dialogg what she saw as Google's 3 biggest mistakes.

Mayer saw Google Wave, the closing of DejaNews on a Monday morning, and the timing of Gmail's launch as the company's greatest missteps during her time there. She explained:

Wave. Certainly there were things we learned from that, things we would have done differently.

Shutting down DejaNews at 11am on a Monday morning and not really having any way to post to or browse newsgroups was perhaps a mistake.

Launching Gmail on April Fool's day, which was widely misinterpreted.

Mayer told O'Reilly in June 2009 that she was "very excited about Google Wave," adding, "I think that what they're doing is very profound. [...] I really like innovations that come from that very technical place but then manifest themselves in a really delightful user experience."

In her list of missteps, Mayer did not make mention of the company's admission that it had "mistakenly" collected individuals' emails, passwords, and other information with its Google Street View cars. Nor was the recently-settled class action privacy lawsuit over Google Buzz included.

Later in the interview, Mayer named the one gadget she can't live without: Verizon's EV-DO card, which Mayer said "lets me connect to the Internet everywhere, [it's] very important." She divulged that she had used it to get online during a trip she made to Mt. Kilimanjaro.