I received the following email last night, and it still has my fur standing-on-end (defensive rage).

Subject: Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

During a recent review of your account we found that you are currently
displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program
policies
(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en).

--------------------------------------------------
EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network.

VIOLATION(S) FOUND:

It is important for a site displaying AdSense to offer significant value
to the user by providing unique and relevant content, and not to place ads
on auto-generated pages or pages with little to no original content.

Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear
navigation and organization. Users should be able to easily click through
your pages and find the information they are seeking.

Please review Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines (
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 ) for
more information.

ACTION TAKEN: We have disabled ad serving to your site.

ACCOUNT STATUS: ACTIVE
Your AdSense account remains active. However, please note that our team
reserves the right to disable your account at any time. As such, we
encourage you to become familiar with our program policies and monitor
your network accordingly.

Issue ID# 3227412

--------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
----------------
For more information regarding this email, please visit our Help Center:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

Emphasis was mine.

The only pieces of useful information would seem to be “EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/“. The reason is provided as an exercise for the reader to solve, and the status of disabled, but active almost makes the whole thing humorous. The email also has the feel of treating good customer’s like criminals, because of how “bad” customers behave.

So what do I do with this information? “Please do not reply to this message.” That’s the real problem, not my AdSense account. I’ve received an anxiety causing email, and I’m helpless.

Don Dodge, then at Microsoft, now at Google(!), wrote October 27, 2007 what still resonates with me today “Will Google Docs and Spreadsheets succeed in the enterprise? I don’t think Google will succeed in the enterprise. Why? Customer Support.”

“Google doesn’t understand people,” [Don Norman] said. “Have you ever spoken to a Google support person on the phone? They don’t have them. Sure, they’ll direct you to their blogs — where you’ll be lucky if you can find the answer you’re looking for — or they’ll let you give feedback. But do they ever give you feedback on your feedback?”
FROM “DON NORMAN: GOOGLE DOESN’T GET PEOPLE, IT SELLS THEM” BY BOBBIE JOHNSON ON GIGAOM.COM, SEPT 5, 2011

I think they do understand people, and have a stubborn resolve to demonstrate that machines can be programmed to help man better than man can help herself.

They’ll tell you it’s a scalability problem:

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

That is cold, machine cold, comfort.

Customer support isn’t the 1 in a 1000, 10 minute on average problem, customer support is the support you receive under exceptional circumstances. This is when you need support, and when most companies fail to deliver.

So what do you do when you need support from Google? Either you know a Matt Cutts (there is only one!), or you hope your friends, like Chris Messina, working on Google+ and other promising tools with warmth, will help Google find balance and treat their customers, like you know, people.

Oh, and if there is anyone on the Google AdSense team reading this, I suspect that there is a bug in your “review of your account” software, as you probably should have terminated CloudFlare’s account, not mine.

I never really know what I should expect from shared hosting, it’s all Random A$# Shared Hosting (RASH), but this still pained me.

I emailed Joyent support yesterday:

“Regarding http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=942&pc=2 why is there no final resolution on that thread? Why did it take ~ 31 hours to resolve this issue? What is being done to prevent this issue in the future?

It’s also upsetting when an issue is downplayed as “performance issues” or “slowness”. I couldn’t publish content to my site at all for over a day and a half, and Google Analytics show that few visitors made it to my site those days and those that made it might be thanks to the front end content delivery network CloudFlare.”

The response only made me feel a little better:

“The why didn’t it get updated would be my fault as I didn’t post when the resilver finished.

The why it took 31 hours, is that is how long the resliver process took (minus the losing 5 hours on the first replacement drive failed and had to be replaced a second time)

Sorry about the issue.”

I know I’m a bottom tier customer, and it was a long time ago that Joyent was really in the shared hosting business, but I still imagined them being able to resolve almost any problem within a handful of hours.

It’s worth noting that Joyent has been pretty good to me these past 5 years.

host-tracker.com free 30 minute interval:
2011 :ast week uptime:78.40% Downtime:1 day(s) 7 hour(s)
2010: Yearly uptime: 99.96% Downtime:2 hour(s) 52 min(s)
2009: Yearly uptime: 99.71% Downtime:6 hour(s) 31 min(s) – started monitoring only 2009-03

2008: The first half of 2008 was a dark year on textdrive, and I whined to some people I knew at Joyent back then.
2006-2007: was OK on textdrive.

I’ve turned my eye to doing some selective time tracking. This class of software is most often integrated into billing applications.

I’m looking at a few Mac apps:

• Marketcircle Billing $50
• On The Job $40
• TimeLog $25 ($75 with billing)

And a couple of web services:

• FreshBooks $360 /yr
• Harvest $144 / yr
• toggl $60 / yr

The spread in pricing of the web services surprised me. How does FreshBooks justify being so much more expensive?

Those prices are a year’s worth at the “solo” levels of these services. Except toggl, these web services are magnitudes more expensive than the Mac applications.

This provides simple integration with other applications. In other words, I copy and paste an email’s URL into my to do list, and at any time, with a single click I can get right back to the email.

Try doing that with any other email client!

Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

• Explain image URLs in TypePad and why they differ
• How to export my Vox blog?

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.

There is a clear opportunity for online email providers and social networking sites to limit the damage of phishing and email spam by giving customers tools to regulate the flow of data.

Yesterday, before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com story broke, I cold emailed a member of the Gmail team:

Gmail could help web security a lot by providing:
1. Authentication (OAuth) to Gmail address book making it clear that you were not providing your Gmail passsword to a 3rd party web site.
2. Default level of access only provided names and salted hashes of email addresses from address book (possibly 3rd party web site part of salt)
3. Allow only a limited number of actual email addresses to be requested in a time period. I’m guessing ~30 would be a sweet spot.

That would seem to be one possible solution. If this is not a good solution, I think it’s important for your team to look to tackle the problem described below in another way.

EXPLANATION

[Background information described in my "Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story"]

I’ve seen similar UI at othe web services, where everyone in your address book is selected by default. I think there is an awesome opportunity for your team to create an experience that works well for your partners and protects your customers from the type of mistake described above and more importantly from malicious sites.

Some of the problems that I think Gmail and other online email address book and social networking sites should at least take partial ownership by:

• Not allowing 3rd party sites to embed login forms. They should use OAuth or a similar approach. (Even on AppEngine — train us well).
  
• Having a really clear experience about what data you are giving access to (how pissed your friends might be), and a way to provide only limited data.
• Providing salted hashes instead of email addresses, so that a person can find their friends on a 3rd party service without having to hand over the actual email addresses of their friends.

I don’t think I read the Google Chrome Operating System announcement until after I sent that email. When I did read the announcement, I thought about how empowering and freeing it will be for our computing to be in the cloud, but I also thought about problems like this one, and how many scary things can happen when you are no longer hold the container(the harddrive in your PC) for your information and data.  There is a lot of design still to be done to create a safe and friendly experience.