Dino Baskovic Can’t Lose

What up, Parns?  I am such a slacker that I meant to post up yesterday just for the word play but couldn't make my own midnight deadline.  A precocious 5-year-old with a 104-degree fever will do that to a daddy's blog.

And slack I shall.  I have a few posts in mind (e.g. customer service clashes with PR, the web wages war with the AP, bloggers do battle with the FTC) but each of those require more research and writing than can be done in 140 characters or less.  Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I shoot off a few bullet points from other blogs at random, merely because I can:

• Sidewikis.  Just one more freakin' thing.
• GeoCities.  A small tear shed for my old haunt.  Otherwise, buh-bye.
• SocialSafe.  Finally, a way to back up Facebook, 150,000 limbo accounts notwithstanding.  Not necessarily a way to restore profiles, but it's a start.
• Mountain Dew and Pushead.  I am 13 again.  Not to be confused with AMP's new iPhone app which actually is targeted towards 13-year-olds.
• Dyson's new bladeless fan.  If Fast Company, Wired and Engadget are that enthralled (and two outta three thumbs up ain't bad), then I'll probably run out and buy one tomorrow then never use it like my Wii Fit.

See, this was good.  Cathartic, self-serving and an utter waste of time -- like most tweets.  Not a lick of context nor any real purpose.  I should scrape off my feed reader more often.  This is crazy delicious fun.

UPDATE: Gizmodo's review is the best.  True dat.  Double true.

Well, well, well.  Looks like I'm not the only one that feels pain.  Maybe I should've friended Scoble for faster customer service.

Luckily, I got my Facebook account back last week thanks to a kind soul with User Operations. What seemed like months to restore my account was really a few weeks. was a mere few weeks.  While not ideal -- I wanted it fixed in days, even hours -- it could've been far worse or simply never resolved.

I applaud CNET's Caroline McCarthy for being so fair in her assessment of Facebook's current database dilemma:

With over 300 million active users around the world, we shouldn't expect Facebook to be able to respond to every inquiry it receives. And Facebook is a free product, so it arguably doesn't have a customer service obligation on par with your cable company or the Web site where you bought your last pair of shoes. But this is still a real problem for the social network, which has become so ingrained in culture and communication that for some people it's replaced the address book, the e-mail client, and the personal Web site. Many of the e-mails [received] came from people who say that Facebook is their primary method of communication with far-flung family and friends. Others said it's crucial to how they do business.

It's true.  Facebook can only service the customer so much.  And when I lost my old Gmail account last month around the time I lost Facebook, Google was no help whatsoever.  And who can blame them?  The major players offer unlimited web resources with limited people resources, whether we like it or not.  It's a take-a-number mentality and until somebody invents a truly "human scalable" model of technical support, then please continue to hold...

This is why I laugh when I read fanciful approaches to customer service from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed startups like iPhone fitness app developer Gymfu:*

1. Answer ALL emails and tweets.
2. Build a support site that is SEO’d and contains all the questions people ask (support.gymu.com).
3. Find our evangelists and love them.
4. Find our haters and love them more than our own mothers.
5. Do whatever it takes to fix a customer’s problem, even if that means meeting them to give them pre-release code!

That's great if you're a niche mobile app with a loyal yet modest user base.  Not so realistic if said base grows by a googol.

Curses that I can't find the bookmark, but I recall an editorial from last year claiming how we want all want to be treated on a first-name, coffeehouse-cozy basis -- at big box retail with low, low prices.  The same customer service conundrum applies here.  The Facebook fallen want to be treated and released, but are instead forced to wait with the rest of the walking wounded.  Call centers, community-based support sites, knowlege bases, wikis and whatnot -- sure, they help.  Yet, they are no replacement for live chat, a friendly phone voice (even if in an odd dialect) or onsite repair. 

So what can we do?  Crowdsource customer service?  Saddle up the Mechanical Turk?  Or just grab a seat until your number is called eventually, hopefully, any day now?  I lived without Facebook for three weeks, and for all my whining it wasn't so bad.  Granted, 300 million Facebook fans can't all be patient, and you hear the growls whenever Gmail fails (rare) and Twitter whales (set your watch).  That, and patience is a hard virtue to come by in the Twitter era.

My advice to those suffering through this or a similar outage: relax, this too shall pass, have a backup plan and move on with your life.  It's what led me to start this blog.  Thanks, Facebook!  I think?

On a semi-related note, I just started working out five days a week, so I'll give those Gymfu apps a shot.  Provided it doesn't get me booted again, I may even link my Gymfu and Facebook accounts.  Though watch out, Gymfu: if something breaks, I'm putting your customer service through the paces.

* Hat tip to Steve Rubel for the repost.

Ed. note: Reprinted with permission (by me) from LTU Web Design, ISSN 2006212348.  Originally published on March 11, 2008.

We’ve all been there. Deleted a file—or an entire hard drive—and couldn’t recover the data. Sometimes, it’s not your fault. A virus sneaks past the firewall and corrupts your entire PC. Or your laptop bag walks away from you in a busy airport.

It happens. I once lost an entire week’s worth of web site changes, and on one insidious occasion, an entire site. It’s why we keep backups, or at least should. Assuming, of course, we actually can.

Not so much with social networking, as one of my LinkedIn connections recently discovered. With at least one popular social networking site, there is no option to restore deleted profiles, even if by accident.

A cautionary tale
John Pas is a colleague of mine and former boss from my agency days. The consummate sales pro, John keeps a hefty Rolodex and relies on years’ worth of relationship building to do his job. LinkedIn and John were, naturally, a perfect match. He’d built hundreds of connections on his profile, having sent and received many kind recommendations along the way.

So imagine my shock to see John had withdrawn his recommendation of me last night. “Geez,” I thought, “I know I owe the guy a beer or two but this is ridiculous!” As it happened, John was attempting to close an older, inactive LinkedIn profile of himself, and upon doing so, wiped out his current one.

Ouch.

John reports that he’s contacted LinkedIn several times today to no avail. Whether LinkedIn’s customer service can help him remains to be seen. While John’s profile may not qualify as a “mission critical app,” it will will cost him precious time and money to restore his profile should customer service be unable or unwilling to oblige. Like it or not, LinkedIn may be well within their right not to help John. After all, he is contractually obligated to hold LinkedIn harmless, even if it harms his own reputation.

A contract is a contract
It’s common to agree to a web site’s terms as a condition of membership. And I don’t mean to pick on LinkedIn. I know its terms well, which resemble the legalese of most every web site of its kind. LinkedIn has a stellar reputation (to my knowledge) and I remain a fan of its service. I do wish, though, that it had a way to back up my own profile.

Outside of LinkedIn’s boilerplate terms, the only other messaging I could find on the matter comes from its official FAQ:

Be aware that when we close an account, you will lose all of the information in that account, including profile information, connections, and recommendations.

I couldn’t quite find anything that explicitly said “yes, we can reopen your account” or “no, we cannot” so the above statement will have to do for now. And I pause: I have nearly 100 connections myself, a handful of generous recommendations, Q&As and so forth. I can and have always been able to export my connections into an address book format, but my guess is I’d have to re-connect with each and every connection (read: nuisance). I could, uh, save the raw XHTML output for each of my inbox items, miscellaneous notifications, status updates…the list goes on. And then having to re-up on any common-interest groups to which I belong? Again, ouch.

Facebook has a different take on this issue:

If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.

Better, I suppose. Us Facebook users aren’t completely up a certain creek without a paddle. Of course, this doesn’t help John’s situation with LinkedIn. Furthermore, Facebook’s definition of “closed” accounts is not without its share of scrutiny, particularly from privacy advocates. So, now what?

A portable proposition
I do believe that, in the short term, we should call on the social networking sites we use to offer remedial backups of our own profiles. I don’t think this is asking much. Exporting such data to an XML or comma delimited format is trivial at best. WordPress, the platform that powers this blog, offers such an export feature as an example. Heck, it even emails me my backup whenever I want. How nice is that?

In the long term, however, we need a smarter strategy. Enter social network portability, a quitely growing movement to enact industry standards and best practices for transfering data between social networks. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently spoke to this during this year’s SXSW keynote. The ongoing conversation is fairly technical, so if talk of hCard+XFN and interoperability makes your head hurt, well–it should. The end result should be a common and simple solution to avoid the very predicament that is giving our friend John his own headache.

As I woke this blog from its two-year slumber, I vowed to keep regular backups of the blog software, widgets, posts and comments. I think I’ll renew that vow. So should you—it’s your reputation, after all. Why not protect it?

Oh, and if you receive yet another invite to befriend or otherwise connect with someone with whom you already thought you had, give them the benefit of the doubt. Like John, they may need a beer, as well.