Nathan Weinberg is reporting that hundreds of Google users have found their Personalized Homepages settings in a flux.

Users are coming into their accounts and seeing them rolled back several months, losing the last few months of customizations, and any attempt to edit their pages and fix it gets rolled backwards.

Google appears to be aware of the problem, it just doesn’t know how to fix it…yet.

Yikes! So sorry about this everyone… but thanks so much for coming here to report it. We’re now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon.

Some interesting thoughts shared by two Gartner analysts that track every move of Google and Microsoft.

By offering free Web-based productivity applications, Google is looking for an additional vehicle for advertising revenue and trying to distract Microsoft from focusing on its own core search advertising business rather than hoping to grab Microsoft’s big corporate IT dollars, David Smith, a vice president and Gartner Fellow at research firm Gartner, said during a session at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO conference here on Wednesday.

Bottom line?

Google’s trying to figure out how to take some of the business away from Microsoft’s office products, while Microsoft is trying to figure out how to take a slice of Google’s search advertising business.

There’s nothing quite like the helpless feeling you get when a service you use goes down for “maintenance” and you have no clue when it will go back online. I get that sinking feeling whenever my hosting company takes my server offline – it’s frustrating not being able to have control of something outsourced to another company.

If you plan on switching your email, docs, calendar, etc., to Google, you should rehearse exactly how you’ll handle that sickening feeling. According to CNET, Google is warning that users of its free Gmail service will likely see outages…