Webware

How will Google manage growing demand for support for its free products, as people rely more and more on its services?

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

If you rely on a compelling service that happens to be free, what level of customer support are you entitled to receive?

Google is trying to figure that out. Known for using brilliant engineers, complex algorithms and speedy servers to organize online information in a simple and accessible fashion, Google is learning how to add the human touch to its repertoire as customers look for answers that can't be found on an FAQ.

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with the results. Some advertisers have been complaining about Google's Web-page-first approach to customer service issues for years, with the most common gripe that they find it exceedingly difficult to reach a real live human being when they have a problem that isn't answered on a product Web page. More recently, Katie Braband, who reported problems with Google Checkout's handling of transactions at her company, Datto, was just as frustrated by Google's response to her issues as she was the issues themselves. "The only e-mails we've received response to are pre-generated, it's very clear there's no person writing the e-mail," she said in September.

Google is aware that customer service will play a large role in its growth as it offers more paid services, and seems committed to improving services for those kinds of customers over time. "The first thing a CIO is going to say is, 'where is that person and how do I wring their neck?'" said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview earlier this year. Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.

For many users of Google's free services, support is limited to a series of Web pages, FAQs, and user forums. That's not that surprising, since Google can't realistically offer phone support to every Gmail user who can't figure out the conversation-based design.

But as Google continues to push forward with free advertising-supported services that people and small businesses increasingly rely on in their personal and professional lives, the company appears to be banking on its ability to train those users to expect a healthy dose of relatively low-cost support. Web pages with hints, troubleshooting tips, and discussion forums are the first level of support across virtually all of Google's products and are pretty much the end of the line for those who do not pay to use products or services. That's not unusual in technology; even businesses that charge customers for their products have moved in that direction in a bid to cut support costs.

When it comes to Google's main profit engine--the AdWords search keyword ads--there are two basic kinds of customer service, said Deanna Yick, a Google representative. High-roller customers enjoy access to a personal sales team they can reach out and call, but almost everyone else relies on Web-based resources like the AdWords Help Center.

For a while, Google also offered phone support to a proportion of those advertisers without sales team connections. However, it recently reduced the amount of phone support it provides for those not supported by the sales team, leaving e-mail as the sole contact method for a larger segment (Google won't say exactly how many) of its most important customers.

"AdWords is an effective, self-service online advertising platform for advertisers of all sizes worldwide," Google said in a statement regarding the reduction in phone support. "Some clients work with our sales teams, while others prefer to manage their accounts independently. We also provide email and phone support to some advertisers, and have worked hard to build out a robust set of online resources (such as the AdWords Help Center, AdWords Learning Center and user forums) to help advertisers find the answers to their questions around the clock wherever they might be located."

Is this an issue? Google argues that in many cases e-mail and Web support can be faster than sitting on hold waiting for the next customer service representative to answer your call in the order in which it was received. The company can track the most common queries and therefore answer the most commonly asked questions on the Web much more quickly than a telephone-based system would allow, while also developing fixes for commonly reported problems as to cut down on the need for support in the first place.

But on the Google Apps side of the world, the company knows it doesn't have the luxury of pulling back on phone support with its most important customers, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise.

Here, as well, Google tries to encourage its users to solve their issues through forums and troubleshooting pages. It turns to the solution Google employs for just about everything--an algorithm--to get the most relevant information regarding support issues on those pages and before the people who need detailed answers, and fast.

But Google Apps Premium users--who pay $50 a year per user--can also talk to live Google support personnel anytime day or night when they encounter issues. Years of phone-based IT support has trained system administrators and IT executives to expect the human touch when it comes to advanced support, Glotzbach said, echoing Schmidt's comments last month.

Glotzbach--like any true Googler--believes there are efficiencies just waiting to be discovered that could be greatly improve the customer support experience for both Google and its customers.

"I think this is a fascinating technology and innovation challenge that's properly underappreciated as such," Glotzbach said. "When people think of support, they think of large call centers. But underneath that there is a massive opportunity to innovate." Left unmentioned were the cost savings that accompany automated support.

With innovation comes friction, however, as new ways of thinking about old problems grate on the status quo.

Google is pushing into a whole host of businesses in which it is a newcomer, such as Google Apps, Google Voice, and now Google Maps Navigation. In many cases, those products are free, which reduces expectations for premium support (usually). But those products compete against paid products and services that do provide some level of support.

As more and more people rely on these free services--and Google crowds out competitors who can't compete with free--support issues will grow. Even products that "just work" fail from time to time, and those failures present opportunities for companies to build loyalty if they handle the support encounter the right way, and resentment if they don't.

Can Google train those customers to expect a passive Web-based support experience? Or will Google's free strategy evolve into two groups, those willing to tolerate passive support for free, and those willing to pay a little extra for more service?

Either way, managing the customer experience has been a relatively easy task for Google up until now; basic search requires little customer support. It's about to get a lot more difficult.

In the wake of a firestorm over just how much of social-gaming companies' profits can be attributed to potentially scammy offers and incentives, News Corp.'s MySpace has taken a stand (and, it could be said, taken advantage of the PR opportunity) by coming out vocally against them.

"We're adding a fifth principle (to our developer terms of use) that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted," a company blog post by CEO Owen Van Natta read. "Because it's our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers."

What exactly is he referring to? In many of the most popular (and profitable) games built for big social-networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace, players can progress faster in the game by either buying virtual goods with "real" money, or by completing offers and surveys from a partner company like the prominent Offerpal Media. Critics say that many of these offers aren't actually free, and unwittingly can sign users up for expensive subscriptions or programs.

After a public confrontation between TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla at last week's Virtual Goods Summit event in San Francisco, game makers like Zynga and RockYou put out statements saying that they're cracking down on offers that are potentially misleading.

Could this lead to real industry changes? Yes. But keep in mind that Facebook, the biggest destination for these social games, already bans this stuff in theory. "Ads cannot be deceptive or fraudulent about any offer made," the company's advertising guidelines read, and adds "if an ad includes a price, discount, or 'free' offer...the destination URL for the ad must link to a page that clearly and accurately offers the exact deal the ad has displayed (and) the ad must clearly state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer."

But judging by the amount of sketchiness that allegedly takes place on the platform, it seems like advertisers aren't necessarily following these guidelines. Whether MySpace's stance against them can lead to a legitimate crackdown has yet to be seen.

Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.

The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.

"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."

Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.

"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."

With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.

One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.

The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.

Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.

As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.

As of 2:15 p.m. Tuesday e-mail delivery had started to return to normal for some Postini customers, although problems remained.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Some customers of Google's Postini e-mail security product experienced significant problems Tuesday, with reports of hours-long delays in e-mail delivery that are still affecting some customers.

Threads throughout Google's Postini forums spread involving the issue, which seemed to begin overnight on System 7--one of several systems used by the service--and was still affecting some customers as of Tuesday afternoon, although e-mail delivery had resumed for others. Users also reported problems accessing the management consoles used to log into the Postini service, preventing them from understanding exactly what was happening.

Postini, acquired by Google in 2007, offers e-mail security services to businesses. Postini scans all e-mails directed to the networks of its customers for viruses, malware, and spam, passing along the genuine messages to the network once they have been cleared. However, Tuesday it appeared that for a significant portion of the morning, all messages for customers using System 7 were blocked before they reached their destination, and customers could not log into their accounts to see what was going wrong.

A Google representative acknowledged the e-mail delivery delays in a statement. "We're aware of an issue that's causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the US, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Postini support portal at https://www.postini.com/support/support_login.php."

It has not been a good week for the cloud. Hosted applications and services such as Postini were sure to get a second look following the debacle at Microsoft involving the Sidekick and possible data loss.

It's also another example of Google's growing pains with customer support. Google Checkout customers reported significant issues for over a month without any resolution, and angry e-mail administrators on Postini's message boards complained that Google support personnel were very difficult to reach during Tuesday's issues.

Google support technicians promised some Postini customers--who pay between $12 per user per year and $25 per user per year--that their e-mails were not lost, which is at least some good news for customers affected by the problems. But running a business without e-mail in the 21st century is a very difficult thing to do.

Thousands of Facebook users who have been unable to access their accounts for nearly a week and a half now are now seeing their profiles restored--but some data related to recent profile updates may have been lost.

What happened? According to Facebook, the replacement of profiles and login screens with a "down for maintenance" notice--which appears to have started on October 3--stemmed from "a technical issue with a single database." The company has stressed that there is no chance that it was due to hackers or other malicious activity.

Profiles should be restored over the course of the next day, the company estimates.

"Our engineering team has worked around the clock, and as of today, all of these users should begin to regain access to their Facebook accounts," Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said reading from a statement. "We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused and we are taking additional measures to uphold the reliability users come to expect from Facebook."

Less than 0.05 percent of Facebook's users have been affected by the outage, the company estimated. The social network's last head count, about a month ago, was 300 million active users, so that comes out to be a total of about 150,000 affected users. Not very many but enough to put some of them in a panic over not being able to access a primary mode of communication and (in some cases) business.

Profiles have not been lost or deleted, Facebook has continually said--even though the company has been otherwise tight-lipped about the maintenance issue until this point. When affected users' access is restored, however, some things may be different and very recent updates may be missing. According to a notice that Facebook is displaying to members who may have been affected:

You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. We're sorry for this inconvenience; an extended technical issue affected a small number of Facebook accounts, including yours. We have done our best to restore your account to its most recent state, but some data and settings may not be current. In order to be cautious, we defaulted some of your privacy settings to their most restrictive settings. You may wish to review your privacy settings and reset them.

Facebook added that "some of (affected members') content may not be up to date: in other words, some minor data loss regarding recent updates to profiles. This, according to Facebook, may include photos that were recently added or deleted, recent updates to friends lists (additions and deletions), and "other content you've added, sent, received, or posted."

As for the company's relative silence about the matter until now, Barker explained in a phone call that the company wanted to nail down the specifics of the outage and figure out the situation, rather than provide details to users that could turn out to be inaccurate.

Many of the complaints pertaining to the outage alleged poor customer service on Facebook's part, and as a sort of olive branch, the company is encouraging feedback pertaining to the specific outage. The alert displayed to affected members whose accounts have been newly restored directs them to a form to report any further details or additional problems.

Whether Facebook will step it up a notch for future unexpected technical problems remains to be seen.

Something is really odd here.

As a reporter covering Facebook, I do get the occasional cranky complaints from members who, for one reason or another, are experiencing errors when they try to access their accounts. But it's never been anything like the past week, with a steady stream of e-mails continuing to come in from Facebook members who say they remain shut out of their accounts--despite assurance from Facebook that profiles have not been deleted and that the company is working on the problem.

"This is now seven days and counting," an e-mail sent on Saturday morning read. "It's beyond ridiculous and extremely frustrating."

"The experience completely reversed the Facebook opinion and experience for me," one reader complained. "I see many people bitch and complain, many more beg and a few threaten. To me, the route to take is fairly obvious. Mark Zuckerberg on his own page invites democratic input from Facebook users in one of his most recent videos. Given that statement especially, I find the way their user base is being treated with respect to their disabled account policy hypocritical at best."

"My account has now been held hostage for a week," another reader wrote. "Some of my friends think that I have deleted (my profile) or even blocked them...None of my friends or family can see my profile or even find it in search. It's as if I simply deleted my account or blocked all of them from seeing it without even a word."

Some users have started threads on Get Satisfaction and Yahoo Answers. A few others have pointed me to blogs and YouTube channels devoted to the subject.

The inaccessible accounts appear to be limited to a very small subset of Facebook's over 300 million active users, which means that it's not a large-scale issue for the health of the site. And Facebook is supported by neither subscription money or taxpayer dollars (though it wouldn't have advertising revenue without its users) so there's an argument to be made that users shouldn't be complaining about something they don't pay for. But that's an argument that many of the people who have come to rely on Facebook as a channel of communication simply don't buy.

Whether the string of complaints is warranted or not, Facebook hasn't disclosed exactly what's caused the "extended maintenance issue," and that's what I find puzzling.

There are some things that are nice to wake up to. The smell of bacon, for example. On Thursday morning, however, I woke up to something a little less pleasant: an in-box full of e-mails from Facebook members whose accounts are still inaccessible. Some were more or less on the verge of, well, panic.

Earlier this week, we wrote about Facebook's acknowledgment that some members could not access their accounts for several days, instead receiving a "down for maintenance" error. At the time, a Facebook representative explained that it was a "technical issue with one of our databases" and estimated that it would be resolved within 24 hours. It's unclear how many accounts have been affected.

But a resolution of the problem doesn't seem to have occurred, judging by the e-mails that were still showing up in my in-box well into Thursday morning. I sent another request to Facebook to find out more.

"We are continuing to work on the extended maintenance issue that is restricting some users from accessing their accounts," a statement e-mailed by a Facebook representative explained. "No accounts have been compromised during this process, and access will be restored as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Reader e-mails indicated quite a bit of frustration.

"I lost my job back in March and have been using this site as a networking tool," one reader's e-mail said. "It's frustrating that it's been down for so long."

Some were paranoid that their accounts had been deleted and all their contacts lost. And many of the e-mails cited unresponsiveness on Facebook's part despite multiple customer service complaints. Third-party customer service forum Get Satisfaction was filled with chatter about Facebook login and access problems, including at least one threat of a class-action lawsuit.

"Accounts are still down as of this Thursday morning," another e-mail read. "Facebook has been completely non responsive to its users. My account has been down with site maintenance issues since Saturday. I have sent over 20 requests to FB and joined help user groups looking for answers."

From yet another e-mail: "So far Facebook has been largely unresponsive to my emails, saying that this issue can't be reported as a security issue. It seems absurd to me that Facebook customers have no way to directly contact Facebook regarding problems."

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 I 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.

Here's something else: Facebook doesn't offer a way for members to export their contact information into an address-book format, something that took center stage when blogger Robert Scoble had his Facebook account temporarily banned after testing a script that would export his contacts' information to Plaxo. Even now that Facebook has launched its Facebook Connect login product, there still is no easy way to access your contacts offline. The current account-access snafu indicates that this is a big void.

At the very least, Facebook could make some kind of mass message available explaining what exactly the problem is and reassuring people that inaccessible accounts have not been permanently deleted (assuming that's the case)--something easier to find and more detailed than the brief statement now posted to its company "fan page." On a more long-term level, this seems like a big red flag that Facebook needs to streamline its customer service operations somehow so that this sort of hysteria can be prevented.

A way to export basic contact information for offline access--phone numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-message screen names--wouldn't be bad either.

This post was updated at 10:41 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook.

Someone told me recently that they had 22 different log-in IDs. My first thought was, you must get out more. My second thought was, how do you remember 22 different Web services, let alone log-in IDs and passwords?

The answer, of course, is a password manager. These days, I see PC security as a form of insurance. The more you have to risk, the more you should spend to protect it. Anyone who banks or otherwise transacts online will find the investment in a password and personal-data manager worthwhile. Fortunately, if your password-management needs are meager, the protection doesn't have to cost you anything.

Siber Systems recently announced the beta version of RoboForm Online that lets RoboForm users store their log-in data securely online. Just log into the service from any browser and get fast access to the IDs you've saved on your PC. With just one you're logged into your favorite Web sites.

Log into the RoboForm Online service to access your favorite Web services with a single click.

(Credit: Siber Systems)

The first time you use the program, you're prompted to enter a master password. You can change the master password via the program's Options drop-down menu and selecting Security settings, but if you forget a master password, you have to delete all the password-protected files and start over.

... Read more

Typing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's keyboard can be arduous. This is never more evident than when trying to bang out messages in several instant-messaging conversations at once. Shape Services, the makers of the popular IM+ instant-messaging app ($9.99 App Store link), have realized this, and are soon rolling out a new version of the app that includes speech-to-text, albeit at a price.

Taking advantage of Apple's recently released in-app payment system, 99 cents a month gets you the feature, meaning that the annual cost of continuing to use it is about $12 a year. Not bad if you're a heavy user. But how well does it work?

In short, it does a decent job, but it still experiences some of the typical pitfalls found in other speech-to-text tools. If you've used Google's search app on the iPhone you know all too well that it can handle some words better than others, and that it works slightly faster when you're on Wi-Fi. The same can be said of IM+.

The app managed to get a few sentences without flaws, but I regularly found myself going into make a quick edit to one or two words each time. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so long to do all the processing. Over 3G, small quips like a four- or five-word reply took around 15 seconds to process and get sent back, whereas full messages took up to 24 seconds. These times were cut a few seconds shorter when on a solid Wi-Fi connection, but still on the long side.

The updated version of the app is in Apple's review queue, meaning it could be out later this week, month, or be rejected outright (although not likely since it's using standard APIs). Besides speech-to-text, the update also adds animated emoticons for whatever service you're using. It's a small touch, but sure to make IM enthusiasts happy. We take a quick look at that and the speech-to-text feature in the video below. Worth noting is that processing times have been sped up for the sake of time, although we make note of that when it occurs: