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Rael Dornfest, genius programmer and founder of values of n wound up with his company bought out by the bane of the web, twitter, the other day.
I used twitter for a while and I still have an account there which I use to send direct messages to web services that haven’t had the foresight to work with identi.ca. I stopped using twitter because it would stop working on a daily basis. Apparently it’s much better now but I don’t much care.
Anyway twitter buying values of n was bad enough, but along with the news it was announced that the company (which seems to have been basically a one man show) would be shutting down its web apps, stikkit and I Want Sandy. In less than two weeks.
For those of you unfamiliar with I Want Sandy, now would not be the time to get familiar with her although you’d never know that from the site, where they are still allowing you to sign up.
There is now a link at the top of the site linking you to this post at GetSatisfaction where Rael basically says, “Blah blah blah… twitter… sandy… going away… blah blah blah”
The response (which you can read in the comments) has been something like what happened in this room when American Idol was decided earlier this year. The one that sums it up best (and in classy brit-talk) is this one.
I Want Sandy was a free service and as such, we users had to be wary of quality and durability issues. But Sandy worked brilliantly and nearly flawlessly. The few problems she had were often the result of, get this, twitter outages! Recently, as more and more people signed up for the service, an issue developed with Sandy’s timeliness during the morning hours. Even that seemed to be improving though… and then…
So the users are pissed and I don’t blame them. I’m pissed and I don’t blame me either. Yeah, there’s some garbage in the thread at GetSatisfaction to the effect that Sandy’s functionality will soon appear at twitter. Don’t bet on it.
I think Rael has made two big mistakes. The first is tying his star to twitter, which didn’t happen overnight, and the second was suddenly pulling the plug on a userbase of raving fans of the terrific service he built. The result is that there is a growing resentment that will now follow him to twitter.
This is all very unfortunate. Unless, of course, you think twitter sucks.
I’m posting this because I’ll probably forget by tomorrow, and it’s of earth-shattering importance like all my posts.
Forget pigs in lipstick and hurricanes and the tanking financial system. Google has released a sub-optimal browser. There is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
It’s not that Chrome doesn’t do what it needs to do. There’s a ton of functionality* in there. But just try finding it.
Yowza do these guys know how to bury good features. Like keywords for bookmarks, as discussed here.
I dig that we’re all sophisticated web users and stuff like that there and that you Gmen (and women) are all about elegant design. But why make it so you have to have a graduate degree to find a basic navigational feature?
Anyone? Google? Anyone?
*enough functionality that I switched my default browser choice to chrome from firefox. I did that a couple of hours before writing this post. Be warned though you California ggeeks, I’ve got a touch pad and I know how to use it!
UPDATE ^2 (8/15): The two man crew arrived early (they called first). It took them longer to climb the ladder up the pole than it did to fix our problem. Thank you comcast cares for hookin’ us up!
UPDATE (8/14): I tweeted a link to this post last night hoping that the people from Comcast who monitor twitter would see it. They did, as you can read in the comments section. I sent an email this morning at Frank Eliason’s suggestion detailing the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, even including my unfortunate show of temper and hangup on that customer service agent.
Someone from Comcast corporate called me late this morning to apologize. She moved the service appointment up to tomorrow instead of Sunday and gave me her direct phone number. That response scored some major points with me. I still think it unfortunate that it was necessary to raise a holy stink about it, but the response I got reassures me that there are people at Comcast who take even the issues of relatively insignificant customers like me seriously. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
I arrived home from my mail route today to find 2 messages from comcast confirming my appointment for between 12-4.
BRRRRAAAKKKK!
Survey said, between 5-9pm. That’s what the customer service guru told me last night, but it apparently was not what she wrote on the service ticket. What she also failed to write was the cell phone number I gave her, even though she repeated it back to me before we hung up last night. That’s why they called the home phone, I learned later.
Comcast sent a tech out at about 1pm. That was the second message: there was no one home at 1pm.
When I called comcast to get them to rectify their mistake, their implication was that I was the one who was in the wrong. Hmmm… let’s see. Tech comes out to fix internet, succeeds in doing that but gets rid of cable tv signal in process. Customer requests another tech and plans day around promised evening appointment. Comcast sends tech out at wrong time and communicates via the wrong phone number…
Yep, must be my fault!
Now they’re not sending anyone out until Sunday. They wouldn’t budge on this either even though I repeatedly reminded two different customer service people that this was comcast’s mistake and not mine. All they could say was, “Well, the service ticket says 12-4,”
I actually got so angry with one of these people (the one who promised to call back in fifteen minutes but didn’t for almost an hour) that I said, “I’m done talking to you,” and hung up on her. I’ve never done anything like that before, ever and I probably won’t again. The absolute refusal to admit a mistake and make some sort of good faith effort to correct it simply astounded and infuriated me to the point where I couldn’t have spoken anything helpful. I probably should have held my breath and counted to 10, but there it is.
I’ve heard horror stories about comast’s cycnical approach to customer service before and now I have my own.
We’ve got no cable until Sunday morning at the earliest. This did not sit well with my wife because who wants to watch the Olympics.
And Comcast is better than Verizon. I was a verizon customer at one time and their customer service makes Comcast look fabulous. So, where does one go? Nowhere, apparently.
Comcast, if you’re listening, it must be nice to be you. Provide crappy service, maintain a staff of semi-competent or incompetent tech support and customer service people, rake your customers over the coals and laugh all the way to the bank. Good for you! I’ll be sending you a carefully worded letter/email about this even though you won’t do anything about it.
Unfortunately Mr. T. won’t be bursting through our tv screen to say those immortal words.
Why? Because we have no TV signal.
Our internet has been a little buggy of late here in the beautiful parsonage. Today a comcastic geek technician came and unclogged our intertubes. Actually he gave us new ones! New coax cables, new splitters, and a promise of a whole new line from the node on the street to our house so we can attain absolutely screaming feedspeeds!
That’s all good.
Unfortunately he borked our cable tv signal, or at least I think he did, or at least there’s no signal anymore. All we get is a blue screen of death on our set.
This won’t begin to matter to me until I try to watch TruTV and can’t. But it matters to my wife who wanted to watch the Olympics tonight. My reply was, “What Olympics?”
I did try a few incantations in the general direction of the TV. Alas, they availeth nothing.
So another geek technician has been summoned. He or she will purportedly materialize between 5 and 9pm tomorrow. Let’s hope we have both tv and internet when he or she finishes.
Well, not died really, but went to sleep. For the last 12 hours and change, if you stopped by all you saw was a white space with “this blog is inactive” at the top left.
Inactive is a wordpress euphemism for taken down. When I navigated around the back end to my wordpress dashboard I saw that serotoninrain had been deactivated because they believed I had violated their terms of service.
Was it because I said my copier was a piece of crap?
Was it the fact that I have status messages?
Or could it have been… SATAN!
Whatever it was, I immediately began repeatedly emailing wordpress through whatever channel I could find, with ever decreasing amounts of patience. Finally about ten minutes ago I received an email with an apology and a “we’ll never do it again” promise. I’ll believe it when I don’t see it.
I’m not much appeased, I can tell you. It’s like with twitter and how it, you know, doesn’t work. At some point it doesn’t matter that it’s a free service because it’s gone so much it might as well not exist.
I was well into a search for another host when the apologetic email arrived. Who knows, I may still bolt, but I’ve decided to sleep on it and see if my blog is still here in the morning.
In the meantime, let me reiterate what I’ve said before: there will never be an ad or even a tip jar on serotoninrain regardless of the host. I will never post for money (though I will link to the articles I write for 422 Business Advisor and I am paid for those). Finally and most importantly, I will do my best to make each and every post as completely devoid of interest as I possibly can. I think regarding that last item, that I’ve done a pretty darn good job so far!
So there.
I don’t usually get this way. When stuff I like gets taken off the menu (from the supermarket, from my favorite hangouts, from the airwaves) I usually shrug it off and move on.
This time it’s different.
On July 14th, NPR announced that their experimental drive-time radio news magazine, The Bryant Park Project, would be cancelled effective July 25th. On July 14th I was in Rockaway, NJ suffering through the first day of local pastor’s school. I returned on July 25th. During that two weeks I had no time to listen to the podcast of BPP, which I subscribe(d) to.
Soooo, today I was wondering why the podcast wouldn’t update no matter how many times I tried it. I tried deleting the it and resubscribing via the iTunes store only to be told that it wasn’t available in North America. “That’s silly!” I shouted at the screen.
It was only when I surfed to the BPP page that I read the horrible news. It’s gone. The second best show on radio is gone (Car Talk still takes first place). NPR called the show an expensive failure. Maybe if they had aired it on more than 5 stations and promoted it, it would have done better. Idiots.
It was a terrific show with an interesting on-air lineup of people and guests, plus there was Mike Pesca filling in for the regular host Alison Stewart who was on maternity leave. She came back from that leave on Monday the 21st to a job that would disappear after 5 days. Anyway, Mike Pesca is was perhaps the best radio host ever. He will now go back to being the best sports reporter at NPR, which (no offense Mike) doesn’t mean a hill of beans to me. Sports, pffffft.
So anyway, I’m left seriously contemplating whether or not to even listen to NPR anymore. They canned Bob Edwards for Steve Inskeep a few years back which neutered their major morning show, Morning Edition. That show has all the personality of a can of tuna fish now. I like tuna, btw, but not every day. Yeah, they still have Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion but I’m sure they’re doing their best to get rid of those as well.
No doubt some of my politically non-independent readers have strong opinions about NPR being either too lefty or not lefty enough, but I’ve never cared about that. It was always fun to listen to, even if I didn’t like what people were saying. That sense of fun is quickly disappearing, and the cancellation of BPP didn’t help.
Well, at least now my podcast playlist won’t get so backed up.
Goodbye BPP, we barely knew ye.
Does anyone know what’s become of mis_nomer?
A church recently incorporated twitter into their worship service. You can read about it at the link below but before I direct you that way, let me warn you that the post is very long and the first two thirds of it is background. If you want to skip that background, scroll down to the paragraph that begins, “So we started wondering…”
I’m surprised that this worked as well as it did.It was a terrible idea after all. Not because of any theological principle or even because of my own worship preferences, but because the risk of twitter being down was just too high.
However, Twitter stayed up during their service and it seems to have been an interesting experience if nothing else.
therefore I blog.
From the “You Knew This Already” department here at serotoninrain comes this story, the first line of which says it all really:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off.
No explanation for facebooking or tweeting. I’m sure that’s coming soon.
H/T to DY Jeff.
Hey computermangler.com and raidfireultra.com!
The bothayouz knock it off with the republishing thing! You got it? I hope you got it.
Don’t make me mad. You wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.
serotoninrain 
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