I’m no expert, I’m a zoologist earning a crust on the web, but when this came into my Inbox today via a MyHeritage group mail, it made me happy as Larry as a competitor, but also made me wonder how Geni can expect to encourage users to stick with their service (when there is competition), when customer support on live public forums comes out like this:
_ Unjustified forum moderation « Geni Forum
I don’t see how threads that have degenerated to planning a boycott of geni or finding alternatives is really pertinent to the purposes of this forum. If this doesn’t suit you perhaps next time I’ll simply delete the threads.
Would you like some cheese with that whine, Sir?
I believe this is the thread that started it all: http://forum.geni.com/topic.php?id=37281.
My take home and advice is this: In any web endevour there will be competition no matter what you do or how unique you think you are, and your job as a company trying to make money from your users by providing them with a service, is to keep them happy, at ALL costs, ALL the time. Rackspace calls this “fanatical support”; Guy Kawasaki calls this “creating evangelists from your users”.
Common sense dictates that when your most valuable resource is your userbase, then listening, and acting accordingly, is what wins you loyalty and continued custom…
Ignore this at your peril.
A heads up to great thinking from Fast Company:
_ A Brilliant Primer on Sustainable Design | Green Day | Fast Company
The presentation clearly visualizes and relates a spectrum of conceptual frameworks for talking about sustainable design–what we at <em>Fast Company</em> call “ethonomics” and what Shedroff says should be called “blue” not “green.” Whether “life cycle analysis”, “natural capitalism,” “biomimicry” or “social return on investment,” these frameworks all take place within the three spheres: Human capital, natural resources and financial capital; Society, the Environment, and the Market; or People, Money, and the Planet. Through the applications of concepts like “dematerialization” (putting less stuff in your stuff, like an ultralightweight keyboard) or product-as-service (Zipcar, a shared car rental service that eliminates the need for car ownership), human ingenuity can replace natural resources, close waste loops and make the world a better plac for the future.
Links referred to:
http://nathan.com/thoughts/compostmodern.pdf
http://nathan.com/me/index.html
If only more designers thought like this, and business too, and politicians… check it out.
Just in case you didn’t know….
_ Official Google Blog: Current Gmail outage
If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.
We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.
Even the 800 pound gorilla loses energy sometimes…. And I thought it was something to do with bandwidth in South Africa 
