191–200 of 252 posts
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Agreed. At least on other corporate eco systems (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.), if you are a paying customer, you have great support.
Absolutely! You only have to use 10 year old technology for that support.
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There is a difference between supporting every customer (aka, the mass of people behind your average YouTube comment) and supporting developers that promote your ecosystem. By failing to support this one person this one time, they've damaged a lot more people's experience, and the average developer is much more likely to be an influencer. This guy is influencing influencers because he couldn't get a 2 minute support…
it's a tradeoff. having engaged support for every app developer would mean they would have to admit many fewer apps to the ecosystem. they have chosen to more freely admit apps but provide no support for them.
Not providing any meaningful support is Google's business model - you can see them talk about it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I > Google estimates that they would need to hire over 20,000 customer service people to deal with 1 query every three years from each customer. So it has decided - as far as possible - to employ zero people and rely on algorithms. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-custo…
so then hire 200 customer service people to handle the queries when the algorithms go awry? surely there is an algorithm they can devise that will identify when the other algorithms have made mistakes. right? :-)
Humans have a failure rate for repetitive tasks between 1 and 10% (depending on who you ask). So even (unrealistically) conservatively and including having two steps of appeal, you would need to assume a minimum false positive rate of at least one in 10K cases (you can even make that a million, if you want, by adding another layer) that get appealed.
Now, what do you estimate, how many chrome app store takedown notices, youtube copyright claims, android bugs… whatever, does Google get in any given week?
It is literally unavoidable that there will be a significant number of cases that fall through the cracks. And as long as it only takes one of those to post a blog post and get on HN, I don't see much value in increasing the cost for this any further, tbh (I just love how that article completely ignores any statistics when comparing this with the case of Apple btw. Not only is Safari only a tenth of the size, basic statistics should tell you that you won't be the unlucky bastard in both stores simultaneously).
The issue isn't algorithms or automation. The issue is, that we can't yet completely replace some jobs with them. And humans suck, especially at scale.
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so then hire 200 customer service people to handle the queries when the algorithms go awry? surely there is an algorithm they can devise that will identify when the other algorithms have made mistakes. right? :-)
The problem is that if a human is available to talk to, people will normally tend to that option even if their answer is on the help page.
What you are doing not only violated Facebook's trademark (good luck calling it fair use), but it's also against Facebook's ToS. They have actively gone after extension authors who alter the Facebook experience and even deactivated their accounts. Rightly or wrongly, when you sign up to a service you are bound by the conditions they set out. In this case, making an extension to block advertising is probably not going…
I can see the obvious trademark issue since he used the facebook name. But I don't get why you bring up the ToS. Those are irrelevant outside of FB's website. ToS =/= Law.
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anecdotally, you can get good support if you're a customer, but there's a big difference between a customer and a user. I've heard (not confirmed personally, just overheard at conferences), that if you spend enough on adwords to register on their radar as a customer, things are easy to get sorted even if they're nowhere adwords related. the big difference is that for the most part, google users/developers/... are not…
With Google, you're not the customer. You're the product.
From "Do no evil" to "???"
Feel the power of the dark side..... :-)
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They told me I was infringing 4 years later... when there are numerous apps in the store doing the same. It's also a cleaner that works only of Facebook. Google reviewed it and approved it 4 years ago. The extension is free. There is no advertising. I don't make any profit. I was never told what to do or how to change it so that my users would still recognize it. Also changing its name in "Cleaner - For Facebook" was…
"They told me I was infringing 4 years later... " Laches is only a defense if facebook knows and it took 4 years. Even then, caselaw suggests 4 years is the minimum you'd ever get to complain about. "Google reviewed it and approved it 4 years ago." Not sure of the relevance to the first sentence. It's not the same folks. "I was never told what to do or how to change it so that my users would still recognize it. Also…
Isn't it something like?
Facebook cries to Google. Google notifies Developer. Developer contests trademark infrigement. Google notifies Facebook of contestation.
Google at this point provided the venue for dispute (so complied with the safe-harbor "doctrine"), now Facebook can escalate to proper courts.
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I've recently started to move a lot of the services I use away from Google provided services. Who'd you go with instead of Gmail for email?
Not OP, but I moved all of my email from free Gmail to paid Fastmail about 2 years ago, and I've not had a moment of regret. I send quite a lot of email for work and other things and I have what I think is a higher-than-average number of email addresses to manage. One adjustment I made - I now archive older emails to avoid extra storage costs, which in turn means that searching for older emails is slightly more hassl…