Saturday, August 06, 2011

Google and Facebook - too smart to help you

Try to find the link to the online help for Facebook. Hint: it's at the bottom of the page. Just press the Page Down key on your keyboard until you get there. Go ahead. I'll wait.
...
Found it yet? Probably not. Facebook thinks that you're much more interested in the musings of your friends to want to see what's at the bottom of the page. (By the way, here's the link to Facebook Help Center. You might want to bookmark it.)
Facebook has achieved phenomenal growth with a frequently-changing user interface, a complex process for setting privacy options, and no customer service. If you discover a problem, wander through the help pages until you're satisfied that it isn't addressed anywhere, Facebook is glad to have you report it.
Just don't expect an answer.
You won't get an email if they agree that it's a bug. At most, it might be listed on the  Known Issues on Facebook page.If your problem is fixed, what you tried to do before will just work when you try it again later.
The folks who built Facebook and Google are very smart. They're so very smart that they'd prefer to devote engineering resources toward fixing problems rather than responding to your email queries. In I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards recounts a conversation with Google co-founder, Sergey Brin. Edwards told Brin about the problems of the lone Googler responsible for customer service. The poor guy, noted Edwards, couldn't respond to all of the emails.
Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.
To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient.. If they wrote us about problems, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs.
See? It took two people to write, review, and send a reply to your complaint. Those talents could have been better spent fixing the problem without interference from you.
Something that doesn't work as expected one time will, by the wizardry of very smart people, work properly at some time in the future. The classic pop-culture definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Facebook and Google invite and, to some extent, require this kind of insane behavior.
It's not an oversight. It's their business model. At last check, there are three Googlers and one Facebooker in the Forbes top 50 richest people in the world.

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