Troy gives up on Technorati, I bitch about Gmail’s lack of quality, and I’m quite sure that there are lots and lots of similar stories to share.

One funny thing is that whenever you do manage to reach support, they start citing their “privacy policy” for not being able to help you (and then when you keep asking, you never hear back). MSN did this when I wanted to get a connection log suspecting abuse of my account, Yahoo recently played the same “bugger off” card when I asked them to reinstate my account.

With Gmail, the solution should be simple: quit adding bogus features, get the thing rock-solid, buy extra hardware, and offer “Gmail Professional”, 10 Gigs storage for 10 dollars a month. I’d pay that for top-notch quality webmail, after all it’s my life blood.

But Technorati and similar sites? “We” bloggers (says the blogging newbie) are Technorati’s lifeblood. Without us, no content, no traffic, no people clicking Google Ads. But there are huge numbers of us and it’ll be hard to deal with us on an individual level. Still, the majority of bloggers is tech-savvy and quick to switch to other services, so something must be done…

My prediction for 2006: the services that will thrive and survive are those that elect to KISS (del.icio.us is a good candidate if Yahoo doesn’t spoil it) so keeping things running is a no-brainer, or find a way to communicate with their customers in such a way that it is mass communication as far as the company’s efforts are concerned but comes across as individual communication. That one will be hard, and, as Troy showed, auto-responses to mails just won’t cut it (and not even auto-responding (like Google) is even worse). But I feel that it will make all the difference.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2005 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Blogging, Stuff on the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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