Facebook's Iron Curtain of "customer service"

One irritant about Facebook's management and minions is that they do a really thorough job of remaining behind an electronic Wall Of Invisibility, much like AOL always did.

Need an answer to a question about how Facebook works, or, as in my present case, whether a "change-your-login" email that I'm getting is spam or really from them? Get ready to spend lots and lots of all your free time being steered through pages and pages of other users' answers to anything that resembles your question.

Would it be too much to ask for more authentic Help Center texts written by employees who know the answers to these questions, as opposed to everybody guessing — and their guesses given approval ratings by other guessing users?

Okay, I realize it's free, and I'm sure that's their explanation. But the question here is one that would seem to potentially affect the security of the community at large, since enough "phishers" could cause us to start questioning who's behind any given face on FB, and whether they're trying to turn our computers into nodes on the hacker botnet — no small matter there.

I've been getting this message in my own email, looking every bit the routinely formatted FB type, every day for the last several:

>> SUBJ: New login system
>>
>> Dear Facebook user,
>> In an effort to make your online experience safer and more enjoyable, Facebook will be implementing a new login system that will affect all Facebook users. These changes will offer new features and increased account security.
>> Before you are able to use the new login system, you will be required to update your account.
>> Click here to update your account online now.
>> If you have any questions, reference our New User Guide.
>> Thanks,
>> The Facebook Team

The message looks just like and is FROM the same "@" address as legit 'friending' notices and replies to threads I'm, uh, stitching with. But the link at "Click here" goes to a specific spot at a fishy address, "www.facebook.com.mibbbah.co.uk/", and the genuine-looking "Update" button they helpfully include goes to yet another site across the Pond, "www.facebook.com.fasazae.eu/", etc. And I received no mail or message from within FB about it.

So I just spent way too much time fishing around in FB — at least I think I'm signed in to the real one, he remarked drolly — trying to find some place to read about or report this pretty sophisticated con. But it's a lot like knocking on the door and hearing a voice from inside say, "Nobody's home! Go away."

Related, here:
Posts tagged "Great Customer Service"

A Pair of Local Green Meet & Greets

I'm interested to see what the mood will be of tomorrow's (9/23) Entrepreneur's Breakfast series. The regular stand-up looks to be a sit-down this time around, the "Community College President's Roundtable on 'Alternative Energy, the impact on our region.'"

Curious about the mood since, while we all remain more hopeful than ever, at this point we're still looking for enough real impact to measure.

This will be moderated by Dr. Arthur Anthonisen, with presentations by Don Perry of the WindPower Initiative and Les Neumann, the Managing Director of The Hudson Valley Center for Innovation, which is the host of the event.

The Center for Innovation holds these breakfast presentation/networking events on a regular basis, now at the seven21 Media Center (map: 721 Broadway, Kingston.) A $15 donation is asked. These sessions always make for a good connector.

‘Green’ real estate development conference, October 28

ScheinMedia, publishers of MetroGreen+Business, is sponsoring a conference this fall on the future of sustainable development in the area. TechCity, the former IBM plant in Ulster town and perennial hope of the area for a hot business-magnet, will host this "Hudson Valley green real estate development conference" on October 28th.

Experts and representatives of green tech businesses will hold a half-day of presentations and panel discussions on residential development, economic development, architecture & design and more. The conference’s goal “is to bring green jobs and responsible development to the Hudson Valley for long-term, sustainable economic growth,” according to Daniel Wieneke, president of TechCity, already the home of The Solar Energy Consortium and other green ventures.

Sponsor MetroGreen+Business is an information website for sustainable business and real estate in the greater metro New York area. Publisher Jonathan Schein writes that they're in the business and holding the conference because "the Hudson Valley is considered to be at the forefront of green sustainability. It has an outstanding job talent pool and offers developers, tenants, and employers many opportunities."

This one'll cost you $145, $120 per in a group. Info at (845) 340-9600, ext. 100.

‘Green’ real estate development conference - ScheinMedia

"TechCity to host ‘green’ development conference" - Daily Freeman
(— which said the conference is on the 29th, btw. We're taking the word of sponsor ScheinMedia's site that it's Wednesday, Oct. 28th.)

Related, here:
Posts tagged "Green tech"

Sustainability 'Heat' Map, Hudson Valley NY

Here is the happy result of hearing myself tell someone that I was in the midst of mentally constructing a "heat map" of what's being done in the region to promote sustainable businesses and life. Fortunately, a spark flew: customized Google Maps! I could create my mental map on the freakin' Web, adding one more small node of nutritious info to the area's green network.


View Sustainability 'Heat' Map, Hudson Valley, NY in a larger map

On its own page in Google Maps, of course, you'll see the column on the left listing all the institutions that lie behind the droll icons. (I worked with what they had, which explains why TechCity is represented here by a tent, usually denoting a campground, and utility Central Hudson is left with the campfire. But for Congressman Hinchey, what better symbol than the House?)

This will very much be a work in progress for some time to come, and of course I'd be glad to incorporate related links that are suggested, that I can do some research on, of course. That's because it's really only useful to pass along information that you've qualified somehow, sifting out the low-to-no value stuff, as opposed to those endless lists you find on the net that people seem to have thrown up on the wall with their eyes closed.

Map © 2009 by Bill Ross, Rosswriting.com
but free for use when attributed
and linked to, please.

Related, here:
Posts tagged Green tech
and Appropriate technology

Twittering on about Facebook, etc.

Continuing on my (ir)regular, implied theme of What's Not Hot among topics currently considered high-temperature in the media, two items:

There's lots of twaddle about Twitter in the tech press and online communities. Most of it is just the old demonstration that the writers are Fully Buzzword Compliant, well versed in the latest thing, whatever the heck that thing is and may or may not be useful for.

This Web service appears to be providing the much-needed function of adding yet another layer of distraction to our ADD World. ("Thanks a lot! - what was your name again? Oh, gotta run, see you --") I loved the quote from the last post here, down below, noting that a "friend" had just left a note to everyone that they were brushing their teeth. I'm hoping the writer was kidding, but either way, this is a layer of "content" so thin as to defy measurement.

So I was glad to see this statement in one of the blogs on CNet, the venerable (in Web terms,) tech news site:

"Twitter's not going to change the world"

CNet's Charles Cooper, quoting a video blogger named Loren Feldman:

"Loren's main point (is), anyone who has followed the incessant bleating about Twitter's supposedly existential meaning to our lives--let alone the silly debate over Twitter versus FriendFeed--has to wonder whether tech's chattering class has lost its sense of perspective.

"Are we guilty of navel gazing to the point of silliness?"

Breaking taboos in the tech fishbowlJuly 20, 2008
=== === ===

This tied in nicely with a piece I saw in the Old Grey Lady Online, a few caveats about Facebook -

.. .from a business perspective, it creates some complications.
...I neither want to be strategic in my postings nor selective in my friending, but I should probably be doing one or the other. I am also not religious in maintaining my profile, in part because I have no personal assistant to update my page, as one executive I know told me he does.

Once you jack in, Facebook creates its own imperatives. Why am I uploading pictures of my last family trip to the lake in the Adirondacks at 11:45 p.m.? Because I want someone, anyone, to see them.

When a new media winner like Facebook comes over the horizon, who loses? In my case, it’s probably my real actual friends. As a reporter, I learn to hate the telephone during the day, but at night I feel somewhat social again and step out onto the porch to call buddies for a little nocturnal quality time. Now I am too busy checking their status updates to actually speak to them.

The Media Equation: Hey, Friend, Do I Know You?
By David Carr, July 21, 2008
=== === ===

Exactly as e-mail now reflects the pounds of junk mail in our "street" mailboxes, all new media will eventually return to earth, mirroring the net level of quality-of-life that most people are functioning at. (Not that there aren't people who reach for something more, a higher level of practice in whatever they do, of course -- imagine what it would be like if there weren't enough of them quietly anchoring things).

Postscript:
As you'll see from the date of the following post, I dropped out of blogging for awhile there, to take a break after two+ years at it -- even if admittedly doing it at a fairly relaxed pace for the medium, as it's currently understood. Once I saw that a few big bloggers had heart attacks over the last year, then that my favorite blogger, Maura Welch (who I began reading in the Boston Globe), just renounced regular blogging, and some other bigtime blogger just said goodbye, too... well, now I feel like I'm on the leading edge of the next hot trend, the post-blog Web!

But it's just another wave in the natural progression of new modes...

Interface or Face To Face?

A long, slow wave of understanding has been coming on to me lately, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that the world has moved online. It’s a hunch that my own focus has to be on meeting, being engaged and working with people face to face -- even, and maybe especially, where the subject is the Internet or tech applications in general.

I love the Internet as the meta-tool, and as an evolving art form. It’s the printing press, the mailbox, the soapbox, the radio station, the portfolio, the demo, the business card you can open up and look inside, the jukebox, the movie theatre… I’ve been infatuated with computers and software for over 20 years, and still get that charge of enthusiasm from what they enable me to do.

But the real world is still like the whole grain: it's only full, complete and really works right when all the naturally occurring parts are there. In communicating with people, that includes tone of voice, touch, body language, hundreds of facial muscles that each convey meaning, scent, and there'll probably even turn out to be some other subtle facility that science will chance across in due time.

Web videoconferencing, etc., hasn't changed this, and media truly never will. (Although, as now, lots of people won't know or care about the difference.)

Not that this concept negates the value of the Web; it only puts it in its proper place, which is the printing press, the mailbox, the soapbox, the radio station…

The point is, that with this awesome Swiss Army knife of a tool being utilized to the fullest, there’s still an essential place for meeting and talking with people “in person” -- looking them in the eye, listening to and responding to what they say, on the spot. All in the service of being able to get a gut-level impression of the people, still the most reliable indicator when deciding if you want to work with them.

One meeting is worth a thousand e-mails.

(Okay, or a hundred Webcam video conferences.)

Web-based apps vs. Verizon customer service

Lots of updated buzz recently on the newly dubbed “Webtop,” claimed to be the natural evolutionary successor to the electronic “desktop.” (In quotes because, remember, the original "desktop" is the one that your computer now covers.)

Google, Microsoft and many others imagine that you’d rather use a word processor running on their server farms than one installed on your own, once-“personal” computer. But as of this point in history, the highly touted promise of web-based applications just sounds like a Really Bad Idea (RBI).

(Excuse the interruption, but I’m informed that, especially since it’s the first week of the baseball season, we need to find another HTA -- High Tech Acronym -- for that.)

Think you’re dependent on an Internet connection now? What if you’ve got a thought that you want to get down right away, or a string of numbers you want to add up? Better lay in a supply of pens and yellow pads. If your thinking is as connected to words on paper/screens as mine is, you’re surely going to need them. We're just not there yet, or even very close.

Why, just take the recent case of injured blogger (and NBA hoop artist) Gilbert Arenas, who recently wrote about the hardships of being on the bench during his team’s stretch run to the playoffs. "I think the worst part was that my Internet connection wasn't acting right, so my video game session wasn't working. It kept kicking me offline. So, when you're injured, and video games [are] your life and you can't play, it just makes the injury that much worse."

This guy is a jillionaire, but he was as helpless as you or I when his Internet connection was down. What if he needed to do something important?

But let’s move on to more serious examples. Exhibit B: As it happens, this provides me with the perfect opportunity to rant about… I mean, comment, with oodles of cool, rational objectivity, on the truly dreadful state of Verizon’s DSL customer service.

In my recurring sideline as an indie tech support troubleshooter, I’ve had the delightful chance to spend hours on the phone with Verizon’s woefully under-trained and otherwise unprepared customer service people. And I mean sometimes hours per customer.

It is simply a nightmare. And I want to make it plain that I don’t blame the individual support reps; I’m sure they’re very bright people. Nor do I consider it a reflection on the country these folks are obviously sitting in, in the middle of the night on the other side of the world.

But it really does appear that Verizon, like other solely cost-conscious companies, is trying to do way too much too fast, following the custom of the software industry of working out all the bugs on the general population. One customer was given the most astonishing array of conflicting answers in a series of phone calls that you couldn’t believe they could possibly be from the same company. But sadly, they were.

Then there’s the language problem. I had one conversation where I explained the problem over and over, as clearly and slowly as I could (a no-connection error message dialog that would not go away, interpreting the Cancel button as meaning, “Try again!”), whereupon the support lady’s repeated response was, “Okay, can you explain what problem you are having?”

It was over a half an hour, what with on-hold time and all, before she decided the error message was coming from another department’s turf, and transferred me to someone else. That next rep was a very competent, clever person – her name was Rita, who I believe was sitting in Mexico – who I spent another hour on the line with, as she talked me through a series of command-line exercises.

When we were done, an hour and a half later, all was good – until the next time I rebooted, whereupon the exact same problem reappeared.

The New York Times’ David Pogue recently reprinted a surrealistic transcribed conversation from a Dell customer support call to that same country that I don’t want to blame, but where the people speak a version of English that most Americans find pretty much inscrutable. (That single post attracted 153 "yeah, me too, dammit!" comments.)

I really do feel sorry for those people, because for them this surely must qualify as the High-Paying Job From Hell. Because even when they probably only receive the same dollars per hour as someone starting at Borders Books in the U.S., (where, last I heard, they generously offer the minimum wage,) apparently that’s a lot of money over there. But imagine what they say about us when they’re released from their cube-farm stalls in the morning.

These travesties all come from companies that make their decisions based solely on the short term cost. But they are seriously failing to consider the Total Cost of (customer) Ownership. If the cable companies came up with a competitively priced offering, Verizon would be out of broadband contention in very short order, and deservedly so.

"18 inventors picked to join Hall of Fame"

(From the story by Natasha T. Metzler, AP - here in BusinessWeek:)

"Inventors of the MRI, the Ethernet, the LP record and a popular weedkiller are among 18 people picked for induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (founded by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations).

"The 2007 class of inductees, announced Thursday, join luminaries such as Thomas Edison, Velcro inventor George de Mestral and Charles Goodyear, developer of vulcanized rubber..."

I can certainly relate to the LP record, the Ethernet standard, and the packet switch, another inductee, and acknowledge that magic combination of Vision and Make-It-Happenitude of their inventors (respectively, the late Peter C. Goldmark, Bob Metcalfe, Paul Baran).

But, tragically mindful of the TCI (Total Cost of Inventions), the mention of weedkiller reminds me, once again, I hope they’re also paying attention to technologies that clean house and pick up after other, messy technologies.

The other question I had regarding these Hall Of Fame selections was, why didn't they list the inductees' lifetime batting averages?

(Magazine cover: "Build Your Own Television Receiver," from 1928.)

Quoted again on Boston Globe's site, on 'Web 2.0' & American Idol

We are right pleased to have been quoted again in the Business Filter, the Boston Globe's online business blog. Columnist Maura Welch wrote:

Bill Ross admits he's a 'wicked music snob,' and writes with a great little rant about my post about Bix, the soon to launch site that will let advertisers sponsor contests like American Idol online.
"The 'Web 2.0 version of American Idol' says it perfectly about where, IMHO, all the social networking sites are ultimately headed. And that's to the place called 'The Lowest Common Denominator,' a plane where I have seldom if ever found anything of value."

(Ooh -- sure does sound like a wicked snob, hm?) I'd written her about the Bix post, and since I'd recently written the lengthy rant you see below (7/20) on the same general subject, it enabled me to "repurpose" a little of it.

(Here's the rest of what I wrote to Maura, for that extra bit of context:)

Now, I'm speaking solely as a Consumer of Content here; maybe somebody can indeed make big bucks off this. But if I was starting a venture, I'd want to base it on something that I felt had inherent quality, as opposed to starting out knowing I was going to be creating and living with a junk generator.

Caveat
Let me admit that I've yet to watch more than one minute of AI (there's an overused acronym for you: Artificial Intelligence, Allen Iverson, neither of whom I look forward to seeing play for the Celtics,), because it immediately seemed evident that,

a) it was just "Star Search" reborn, with all these people who had obviously been painfully coached to act like stars, with all the old gestures and cheap tricks,

b) most of what I heard about Idol was about the nasty things that guy Simon would say to those poor contestants. Like the bumper sticker tells us, "Mean People S(tin)k." Plus, I'd be shocked to discover that it wasn't fixed.

The Thing About "User-Generated' Sites - YGWYPF?

You hear an awful lot these days about the miracle of User-Generated Content on the Web, from all these startups and companies who believe they’ve found a way to create content-rich sites in no time, and at no cost.

You put up a wall, thousands of people presumably throw, uh, “material” up on it, and presto! You’ve got a bona fide content-driven website that attracts millions of visitors – mostly the immediate friends and family of the ones who threw all that compost up there – and you sell billions of dollars worth of contextual ads.

And it’s Free; it costs you mothing to create all those pages of what-all. It’s hard to argue with that… except by invoking YGWYPF, the timeless axiom that holds, “You Get What You Pay For.”

It reminds me of the pre-Internet, AOL days, when “chat rooms” were all the rage. But when I first joined, all I found was what I've heard people say MySpace is now full of: teens, or the teen-like, just mindlessly blabbing away. After a few visits, I was outta there.

CNET's Download.com Music section recently went through a redesign that now emphasizes commercially promoted bands over the user contributed music that they established the site with, because, as one of the staffers confided in their artists’ forum, 'Let’s be honest, most of it is awful.'

That's who usually shows up for these parties. If you’re lucky, you attract the kind of Early Adopters who enthusiastically add stuff that people do want to look at or listen to. But with success and increased visibility come the unseen throngs of those who, and how to put this gently, have less to offer.

Some have not yet developed their talent, let’s say, but either no one’s told them or they’re just not listening. Then there are the poor souls whose level of enjoyment is so limited that they can only delight in trashing things.

They’ll all dive in there and fill your site with junk, Because It’s There, and they can. There’s an old saying that, some people have nothing to say – but it takes a long time to find that out. So user-built sites may have a decent shot at a run, but it’s usually relatively short-term, and many such ventures wind up as ghost sites where the visitor soon realizes nobody's home anymore, it's all on auto-pilot, and they leave.

Not that there haven't been big successes, and it is pretty cool that you can throw some software out there and thousands of people will fill it up, potentially creating a new community from like-minded but widely distributed people who wouldn't have connected any other way. (See? We're not being totally Grinchy here.) But it ain't as easy at it looks to maintain and react to a site like that; it requires some strong editorial input and management, too, unless you're fine with site whose between-the-lines motto is, "The Lowest Common Denominator!"

1st post on Blogger

Greetings. I've already been at this for a few months now, posting items "manually" to my site (seems funny to use that word to describe computer coding, but those were my hands on the keyboard and moose).

I think what we'll do here is start with this intro from when I first started to (we)blog in March, and add a few of most recent items to get things started. Then I'll start adding the new items here. If anyone's interested enough, you can click over to today's other post to read the previous opinions and what-all.

(Yes, that was "moose" -- which, looking at it now, seems a lost naming opportunity. Phonetically speaking, wouldn't that one have been better used for cows?)

But here's the original introduction, so everything sorta begins at the same beginning:
= = = = = = =

(3/23/06)

We begin...

Alright, I give up, I'll blog, already! Having a weblog on a site has moved from accepted to expected. (Plus, it just occurred to us, it's a demonstration of commitment to the site -- it shows it's not a Ghost Site, that there's somebody home, always tinkering away and adding to it.)
I just had to figure out the subject and the mode: which is, as of this writing, an awkward, maybe slightly schizophrenic blend of light, Cool Electronic/Internet Stuff links with the somewhat heavier topics, like What's Going On, and we don't just mean Marvin Gaye's musical plea.

Things like the present and near-future implications of our lives becoming so thoroughly digitized, and the preservation of the natural world against the mass destructiveness, both made possible at that scale by technology.

However, we believe it's best to focus on solutions, even just building blocks, because there're already enough other people ringing the four-alarm bells, aren't there? Please tell me something I can do about it... or at least tell me about people who are.

=O=

I'll tell you the truth, I find most blogs to be blah, a big, unending deposit of unedited blah, blah, blah. But it is a medium that has its appeal and advantages -- it's a conversation, isn't it? And we're all attuned to that, and people kind of expect it of a site these days, so why not? It's just pouring the same juice into a different shaped glass.

It's not like I have any shortage of opinions on what's interesting and worthy of attention, of all the phenomena that stream by in the e-news and the real world. So, I'll occasionally pitch in paragraphs and links here to Cool, Crucial, or Useful Stuff that catches my eye.