March 31, 2009

Handling Things

Jason Fried of 37signals wrote a post recently about Get Satisfaction in which he brought up many reasonable and valid points, but in the end, the message was lost in the mob's decision that Get Satisfaction team was comprised of terribly evil people.

It’s not often that I care enough about a topic like this to take the time and share my thoughts, but for some reason, it really struck a nerve with me. Next Update has paying accounts with both companies, so I’d like to think I can be objective about this.

Building Frustration

All of the points Jason made are valid. There’s no arguing about that even if some of them weren’t entirely accurate. Hell, even the team at Get Satisfaction didn’t argue with his points. However, the tone of the message created a conversation that devolved into primarily a knee-jerk “you should sue them” reaction.

My guess is that Jason was perturbed after months of 37signals customers being frustrated and confused by the lack of responsiveness when they posted on what they potentially perceived to be a valid support forum. If so, that’s fair. I think any of us would be mad if another business was maliciously misrepresenting themselves and, as a result, causing customers to be upset with us rather than the business doing the misrepresentation.

However, the rant was clearly based on an assumption that Get Satisfaction was indeed being malicious. In the post, he explains that he is under the impression that Get Satisfaction has malicious intent.

The heavy handed tactics used by Get Satisfaction seem to indicate that their long term plan is to own every company’s customer support experience – whether it has your permission or not.

While I’m not best friends with the team at Get Satisfaction by any means, I have had several very positive interactions with them, and unless they’re good actors, Jason’s assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. The team is out to provide a forum for customers to voice their thoughts, good or bad, when a company has ignored them or failed to help them. That’s a valid and worthwhile cause. They’re certainly not out to deceive everyone into thinking they are the only legitimate source of support for companies.

Throwing the first stone…

We’ve all made mistakes. We will all continue to make mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and certainly no company is perfect, but there’s a saying that comes to mind and couldn’t be more appropriate.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.

That’s not to say the team at Get Satisfaction is ignorant, but when you’re building a large web app, some things are going to be overlooked. This is especially true if you’re launching something while attending the largest web conference in the world. For Jason to attack Get Satisfaction so voraciously and stir up a hornet’s nest of vicious commenters was taking things a bit too far, in my opinion.

The Outcome

Thor and Eric from Get Satisfaction responded quickly and graciously. Not only did they immediately address and correct Jason’s concerns, but they were incredibly and sincerely apologetic. Thor’s first comment communicates his concern…

Gosh, we messed up on the wording of that badge and are changing it pronto. The wording on that badge was actually intended to explicitly state that the space was NOT OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED by the company, but that doesn’t come off at all.

And Eric follows up shortly thereafter with his thoughts…

We definitely appreciate feedback like this, and I’ll make sure everyone on our team gets the message. If there’s ever anything I can do to help, please call on me. I’ll do my best - in the spirit of great customer service - to hopefully help you get some level of happiness

Shortly afterwards, GS held a live chat during which multiple people in the company were trying to take the blame for the problem. Let me repeat that. Multiple people within the company were trying to take the blame. Not only was the company apologetic, but the employees were individually and genuinely concerned about the mistake.

That says a lot about a company, and that’s the measuring stick that should be used to judge the GS team. They care, and they care passionately. While Jason couldn’t have known that without talking to them, it certainly wouldn’t have been too much to ask to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Ultimately, the outcome would have been the same regardless of how the complaint was delivered. The team would have made the updates and they would have made them quickly and graciously. By choosing the method he did, Jason unintentionally shifted the focus from constructive criticism into a vicious attack, and it became difficult to see the forest through the trees.

From the few people I’ve talked to, the consensus is that 37signals came out looking like the bad guys in this, and Get Satisfaction looks like a caring, responsive, and responsible company. Regardless of whether that’s the case for everyone, it’s clear that Jason’s tone, not his complaints, caused the negative perception.

The Community Facet

This is an incredibly small community, whether we realize it or not. We might have access to millions of people around the world, but day-to-day, we’re collaborating and learning from each other, and I have yet to meet someone from the community that was a clearly evil person. I’ve always found the web industry to be one of the most friendly collaborative industries around. I’ve seen direct competitors openly share ideas and best practices. I’ve watched direct competitors buy each other beers and talk like best friends. Today really caught me off guard, and I think that’s why it bothered me as much as it did.

I find it unfortunate that so many people were so quick to attack a company based on one blog post without trying to objectively look at both sides. After reading all of the comments multiple times, Jeff Croft really nailed it for me.

37signals is a small business. GetSatisfaction is a small business. They exist in the same community. They have many of the same customers. They use many of the same tools. They’re (presumably) both being affected by a shit economy right now. They’re not competitors. You’d like to think these kinds of companies would be supportive of one another, especially in times like this.

The problem isn’t in Jason’s concerns. Those are valid. The problem is that we all have more important and more productive ways to help each other improve. It’s clear when a company cares and is willing to improve. Going off on a company like Jason did should be reserved for when reaching out fails. Get Satisfaction cares deeply about constantly trying to improve. They didn’t need to be attacked to be motivated to improve.

They’ve both made mistakes along the way, but I think the important lesson is that these things go better for everyone involved when we give people the benefit of the doubt and make an effort to reach out to people instead of just attacking them.

Summary

I still can’t quite figure out why today’s events affected me as much as they did, but I sincerely hope that everything works out for the best for everyone. 37signals is a great company that’s done some incredible things for the web community, and they certainly deserve all of the respect they get. I can’t say I blame Jason for any of his frusration, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t have behaved in the same way had I been in that position. It certainly would have been tempting.

Get Satisfaction is not an evil company out to confuse and hurt people’s perception of other companies only to blackmail the companies into giving them money. They made some mistakes, but who among us hasn’t? More importantly, they addressed their mistakes openly, honestly, and quickly. How many other companies would have responded like that?

Comments

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There is a right side...

March 31, 2009 at 07:33 PM by Gene Crawford

I see your point Garrett, considering both sides of the argument is constructive. But really in the end I think you have go with 37signals. This point in particular that Jason Fried brings up:

“Google searches for “[COMPANY NAME] support” will end up linking people to a Get Satisfaction page. If that’s not the official support home for that company, who winds up winning? It’s not the company. It’s not the customer. It’s really only in the best interest of Get Satisfaction.”

GS may have had the best of intentions in mind with their app, but they are ‘borrowing’ the brand of other larger more successful brands and using it to their advantage, and in doing so potentially harming those brands by setting up false expectations.

It’s my opinion that even the badge itself isn’t enough to solve this issue. It’s the fact that they have some 14,000 ‘unofficial’ support pages for products and services floating around on the web…

Great post

March 31, 2009 at 07:34 PM by Derek Nelson

I felt the same way you did after reading Jason’s post today. I understood most of the points he made and at the same time felt really bothered by the way he was communicating them. Jason just seemed liked he was in a bad mood and wanted someone to take it out on. :)

Thank you for this

March 31, 2009 at 07:40 PM by tav

I was saddened by many of the knee-jerk comments on the 37signals blog.

Thank you again for providing this voice of sanity.

Lying is designed into the system

March 31, 2009 at 07:47 PM by Mark Ury

Garrett, the heart of the problem is that GetSatisfaction’s customer development is predicated on a lie of omission, along with a system that is actively designed to fudge the notion about who’s who in a brand’s support ecosystem. So when the GS team hops in to “fix” things, what they’re fixing is a PR problem brought about by someone with the clarity and influence to explain their schema/scheme.

(Your post is appreciated nonetheless ;)

They're still improving, and they aren't evil...

March 31, 2009 at 08:16 PM by Garrett Dimon

Gene & Mark - I think the problem is still the perception that the GS team is made up of fundamentally bad people, and I assure you that’s not the case. GS isn’t a huge faceless corporation, it’s a small team of really smart people that want to do something good for people who otherwise get neglected or ignored by the large faceless corporations. They weren’t out to take advantage of anyone. I understand how people could arrive at that assumption, but it’s just not accurate.

In focusing so heavily on helping customers and individuals, they made a mistake in overlooking the companies’ perspectives. It wasn’t malicious. It was simply an unintentional side effect of trying to be champions for everyday people.

They’re not done working to improve and rectify the problem. The changes they’ve made are only the beginning, and they are genuinely interested in doing the right thing just as they were genuinely interested in doing the right thing before Jason’s post.

They’re the first to admit that they made a mistake and they will work to correct it. I’ve chatted with Thor, and they plan on taking a little time to decide on the best course of action for a long-term solution, but I have every confidence that they plan on improving dramatically.

They're not evil. But they are smart.

March 31, 2009 at 08:46 PM by Mark Ury

I don’t think this is something as simple as they’re not “bad people.” Most reasonable people aren’t questioning their morals. What’s questionable, however, is how “very smart people” could overlook the appearance of their system, pages, URL strategy, identity sampling, copywriting, badges, layout, and overall positioning and NOT notice that an average user might misunderstand who’s representing whom.

Then there’s the auto opting-in of thousands of companies into their database. Who, precisely, authorized this? Why should they have to? And again—how could the GS team not understand this violates a company’s brand? This isn’t like Google indexing. They’ve slurped into their presentation layer several artifacts that give the appearance that a company has taken roost on the service.

It’s rather challenging to see this any other way: GS created a system that gave the appearance of endorsement and used that to gain traction with dissatisfied customers. In turn, they used that traction to compel companies to get involved because a conversation/data/linking had already begun.

Facebook apps do this kind of crap all the time to game the graph and get users. Miss a word here, shrink a link there: it’s pretty basic thinking. And certainly not accidental.

Again, I don’t thing GS is bad or evil or any of those schoolyard words. On the contrary, they’ve built a very smart system that only occasionally crosses the line and therefore, for the most part, has gone undetected.

No "auto opting-in" or "slurping" involved...

March 31, 2009 at 09:20 PM by Garrett Dimon

Mark - So, part of your comment is inaccurate. They aren’t auto opting-in anyone, and they aren’t “slurping” anything. They have openly stated that any company page that has been created was done so by either the company itself (approximately 90% of the cases) or a user of the company’s products/services. So, in that instance, they are, at worst, guilty of providing a public place for people to start discussions about a company.

This is no different from any other forum, really. How many forums are there out in the world discussing Apple products? There’s no expectation that Apple can or will patrol them all, and it’s not fair to customers to say that the company should be the arbiter of where that customer can and cannot talk about the company. In this case, GS says “no employees of this company are here”. It can’t be much more obvious than that.

So, that leaves the problem of the logo usage, and that may be a valid concern. That’s certainly not my area of expertise, and I wouldn’t dare try to argue for or against that. Thor said in the chat that their legal counsel guided them that the logos were fair use. So, they weren’t ignorant of it, and they did seek advice to make sure it was acceptable use. Again, they wanted to do the right thing.

The fundamental assumption that this was a calculated move to cheat the system simply isn’t fair. They aren’t trying to “gain traction”, they’re trying to provide an outlet. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up changing it such that only companies that have officially joined could upload any official logos or markers that would communicate that, and feedback like this will help them make those decisions, but the majority of reactions have been over-zealous.

Appreciate the kind words

March 31, 2009 at 10:03 PM by Eric Suesz

I really have to hand it to you: You have both serious design skills and a way with words. Thanks for approaching this from an even-handed perspective. It’s always frustrating to watch anonymous ranters pile on and then move on. It’s heartening to see thoughtful consideration that attempts to move the conversation to a reasonable conclusion. We’ll do our best to get there!

Aggressive

April 01, 2009 at 12:51 AM by Jeremy Ricketts

“Company B has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.”

I have to say, that was a pretty aggressive, tacky message. I’m glad they changed it. When I ran a small business, the Better Business Bureau would always hound me for being listed on their meaningless directory. Now they charge obscene amounts for registration and are pretty aggressive in their sales pitch. “If you’re not listed, potential customers will notice that and ask why.”

Consumer advocacy and similar types of organizations are usually a good thing until they become too powerful or influential.

Who watches the watchmen? (I couldn’t resist)

Poor little GS

April 01, 2009 at 03:14 AM by Rimantas

I don’t buy this ignorance argument. In the open letter to JF Get Satisfaction describe the changes they did and reading that one should be pretty naïve to believe that the wording on the badge was accidental. I think the new text albeit more subtle isn’t much better: > “No one from 37signals has sponsored, endorsed or joined the conversation on Get Satisfaction yet.”. Sounds like “Oh those bad guys, they STILL did not join our forum!”.

So what we got there—a message on the GS badge that was public and utterly wrong and Jason having all the valid points. Why should he keep it quiet is beyond me. Maybe GS then should keep they CCP badges in hidden private places?

> “From the few people I’ve talked to, the consensus is that 37signals came out looking like the bad guys in this, and Get Satisfaction looks like a caring, responsive, and responsible company.”

Well, talk to more people in that case. For me GS looks like company caught red-handed and just doing damage control and PR spin based on “there is no bad publicity” premise. Just look at their so-called open letter: “Hey Jason, sorry we did screw up, now all read the long story how wonderful we are”. Meh.

Not so simple as black and white

April 01, 2009 at 03:22 AM by Caleb

Internet communities clash all the time, it is indeed interesting to see the fringes of both sides who don’t get the conversation sharing their two cents. As humans we like to reduce our battles into black and white, makes things simpler. We also like to take that decision and misapply it to other situations, which muddies things up even more. Some can only see the trees and others are only looking at the forest.

Obviously to 37Signals GS was in the black column. Their response was a bit heavy handed that way, but I think it’s completely valid for them to feel the way they did. I don’t think at the end of the day 37Signals is out to hurt GS, but they don’t want GS to hurt them. Their blog post has positive impacts. First it forced GS to act fast, they need to protect their own interests. Second it got the message out that 37Signals does not really even look at ‘their’ GS page, sure it’s not blanket knowledge, but it helps direct their customers to the right channels. Third it raises awareness for others that maybe they should check and make sure they don’t have a community of users looking for support in the wrong place.

On the other hand GS wasn’t trying to hurt 37Signals or companies in similar positions, but at the end of the day they were. Could all of this been better handled privately and then taken public (keep in mind all the positive points I think 37Signals was trying to go for above)? Probably, but then I’m on the fence cause GS has let support problems that negatively impact 37S be out in the public’s eye. Though on the other side of that I’m not sure that only allowing companies that have opted-in to GS be on their site is a good solution either.

I think GS is great, I like the premise. I like that it can be unofficial place for people to figure out their problems. I like that customers can help other customers and that at the end of the day it can be invaluable for that avenue to exist. I think part of the problem and it will be consciously on the minds of the GS team now, is that there is no one size fits all customer support solution. In the end I think that will make their product and company better in the long-run for themselves and the communities/companies they are trying to serve if they look at each feature and wording from the different perspectives that are in play.

It smells sneaky to me as well

April 01, 2009 at 04:55 AM by whistle

The claim that all the pages on the site were created by users utilising the service doesn’t really hold up, I would be astonished to discover that users went out and sourced the logo etc forthose companies who have them.

not to mention that some links…like this one:

http://www.getsatisfaction.com/bankofnewzealand

lead to get satisfaction forums that have no posts at all except a generic ‘welcome’ post. creating the forum and then adding nothing but a generic welcome post feels like odd behavior…

not to mention Im blamed if I can figure out how to add the competition to it, suddenly Im seeing an easy way to make them look bad..

You're probably right Garrett...

April 01, 2009 at 06:20 AM by Gene Crawford

@Garrett Yep, you are probably right, Eric and Thor at Get Satisfaction are probably really cool people, I kind of get that from they way they’ve opened themselves up from this. The guys at 37signals also seem really cool as well, it is too bad it ended up in a throw-down via blog posts. I don’t blame Jason Fried for not really wanting to contact them directly though, I probably would have done the same thing in the same way.

After reading some of the responses here and on other blogs I’ve come to realize both sides of this argument a lot better, thanks for your post BTW. It’s unfortunate feelings have been hurt, but I think GS will survive, all this attention has to help right?

Thor Muller's open letter to Jason Fried

April 01, 2009 at 06:36 AM by Wade Winningham

This was posted by Muller on the original 37s post towards the current bottom of the comments. Figured I’d repost it here.

Thor’s Open Letter to Jason Fried

The logo's the key

April 01, 2009 at 06:46 AM by Five Minute Argument

My point of view is that the most controversial aspect of GS (bar that unbelievable wording that, thankfully, has been changed) is the use of each company’s logo. A logo is, in effect, a badge of authenticity, one that really does imply ‘this is official’. Not even google displays logos alongside company websites, so I see no reason for GS to do so, for companies that haven’t opted in.

Amen to that

April 01, 2009 at 06:51 AM by justin

Thanks for the post Garrett, it was a moment of relief to read your level-headed comments over on the SvN blog post yesterday and it is a equally reassuring to see this post (and also the open letter to Jason from Thor at GS).

I saw Jason’s post as nothing more than a rant to increase page views at 37S and to sic their rabid fanbase on GS, when a simple email/phone call would have sufficed.

Jason Fried is a D*ck and its time someone said it

April 01, 2009 at 10:04 AM by Tom

He never mentioned that he has actually participated on the page in question almost 10 months ago, look up user JF. Why wait til now and why do it this way?

You should have posted all of Jeff Croft’s quote as he seems to be one of the few with enough credibility to go up against 37s and their obnoxious over the top response to anything they dont like in a play for attention.

Someone should finally tell emperor Fried and DHH that their angry clothes are starting to hurt their reputation.

Thanks!

April 01, 2009 at 10:24 AM by Tony Wright

Thanks for posting this.

I’m in the same point– I don’t know why I was so pissed off at 37s because of this, but you really nailed it.

More than that, though– I’m mad at the torch-and-pitchfork mob that rose up without doing any investigation or offering any benefit of the doubt.

Yes, it was a mistake. Yes, it’s possible that the copy wasn’t vetted or that it that they just goofed and didn’t consider it carefully enough. Yes, it’s possible that, in serving businesses that HAVE engaged (who want it to look MORE official with LESS GS branding) that they went to far for the other (minority) use case.

We all have much better things to do than tear down a company that is otherwise trying to do good things and treat their customers well.

Still don't know why 37S are the bad guys in this

April 01, 2009 at 12:53 PM by David

Taking another look at the Croft quote:

“37signals is a small business. GetSatisfaction is a small business.[…]You’d like to think these kinds of companies would be supportive of one another, especially in times like this.”

How does GS’s practice of hosting a “customer support” page for 37S that does not provide support, doesn’t link to the actual support pages, and causes real customer support problems for real 37S customers, as 37S customer support rep Sarah Hatter commented–how is this “supportive” of 37S? Why is Jason a bad guy for calling them out, but GS are not bad guys for misrepresenting 37S to their readers, and profiting from it?

GS’s paid customer support plans seem like they might be a good value, and they obviously have a good number of fans in the community. But 37S was the injured party. Why do they owe any kind of consideration or courtesy to GS?

I’ve never understood people who say Jason and DHH are arrogant. What do the people want, who say this? If you don’t like them, there’s nothing easier than not buying their products and not reading their blog.

I don’t see how any of Jason’s complaints are not valid, and for people to complain that 37S spoke ill of GS on 37S own site, when the whole matter at hand is that GS spoke ill of 37S on GS’s own site, is a preposterous double standard.

No good guys here

April 01, 2009 at 02:28 PM by Perry Farrel

Garrett, I don’t quite agree with your “GS guys are the good guys” comment. The GS philosophy is a good one where they want to provide support to customers. If that is in fact the primary reason, why not link 37signals support back to their site. Well, because that doesn’t earn them any revenue.

From a 37 signals perspective, the rant makes sense. For one, it makes it clear to the internet community at large they have an active community where users can go for help. It also makes it clear to users using GS as 37signals as their support site that they were at the wrong place. Finally, it bring to light the “mistake in wording” that GS used. From a small business perspective, I think it makes plenty of sense what Jason did. If Jason were to talk privately to this issue with GS, it would tackle some of the points I’ve already made.

Also, while the response from GS to Jason on the surface seems very polite and friendly and the kind you’d approve off, it clearly belittles the whole issue. It rubs salt on injury. Its easy to be apologetic when you are wrong and someone has pointed it out publicly. I’m not sure GS would have been as humble if Jason were to have quietly dealt with the issue.

No good guys here

April 01, 2009 at 02:28 PM by Perry Farrel

Carelessness With the Logo

April 01, 2009 at 02:35 PM by Harper Lieblich

When you put another company’s logo on your website you had better be damn sure that you’ve thought everything through. Especially considering the amount of damage you can do to that company’s brand.

Get Satisfaction should be commended for the upfront apology they issued but in my opinion they deserved every bit of vitriol they received for messing around with someone else’s symbol of integrity.

37 Signals has a right to be upset, but GS handle it classily

April 01, 2009 at 02:44 PM by Marc Gayle

Excellent post.

I do agree that Jason has a right to be upset, but I am not so sure that he handled it in the best way he could have. I am sure that after he had a chance to cool down and thought about it, he probably would have approached it differently.

However, the guys from Get Satisfaction really got their time to shine. Talk about turning a crisis into a huge marketing tool. Quite honestly, I had never heard of them before, but I am so impressed with the way they handled this, I will definitely keep them in mind in the future. It would have been easy & natural to hastily retort with some angry epithet because of the onslaught of attacks from Jason. But they didn’t. Not only did they not, they replied thoughtfully and considered the ramifications of their actions that caused 37 Signals to be upset with them.

I don’t know if I would have been able to resist the temptation to either fight or flee and face the crisis head on - in a graceful way like they did - but going forward, I am definitely going to try.

Thanks Get Satisfaction.

Hungry

April 01, 2009 at 02:47 PM by Chui Tey

There is a lesson somewhere in there for us all.

Your business is centered around the assumption that publicly airing grievances on a third party website is the best way of getting them sorted. And as it turns out, it is extremely painful to the vendor, as you have witnessed yourself. In this particular case, Jason Fried has used his blog as a soapbox, and he certainly hasn’t charged you $1200 for the privilege of commenting on his blog.

I realize as small businesses, everyone is hungry, and the next meal is predicated by the next sale. However, money is tight for everyone, including small businesses, and I would certainly say the original wording sounded mischievous/too-clever-by-half and poorly thought through.

I am not really sure where you go on from here. I’m sure the publicity has brought some measure of attention to your business, and that certainly has to be a good thing.

The question you have to ask yourself is: What do you need to do to remain a customers advocate, bringing in the vendors - not alienating them, and still stay a viable business?

Business Name, Logo infringment, no big deal?

April 01, 2009 at 05:24 PM by Robert

I have to agree that I also don’t like the mob mentality and jumping straight into “sue them” might be a bit hasty. However, I have seen the exact same thing on many well known designer’s blogs about designs being ripped off, logos being too similar, etc.

In the case of GS, they are using the actual logos of these companies and their names, which is helping their SEO, all without the company’s permission, in these specific cases such as 37S.

How can you not see a problem with this? How you can not see a problem when a company doesn’t sign up for a service that you publicize that that company doesn’t care about their customers?

If you have ever taken a law class or read about it you’d know that they are breaking copyright laws and slandering a company for not paying for their services, hence why many were saying you can sue.

You have to ask yourself, would you be OK if I release a competing product of Sifter and then started slandering you and your product, just to get mine noticed? How about if I ripped off your logo as well?

I’d be willing to bet that you’d be just as upset and I would be receiving a letter from your lawyer. Unless, that is, you don’t really care about your business.

Use of the logo

April 01, 2009 at 07:17 PM by Dinah

Thank you for posting, Garrett. The perspective of someone who is an experienced customer of both companies is appreciated.

There does still seem to be a lot of people - guys uniformly as far as I have seen - commenting on the logo question under the incorrect assumption that the sections on Get Satisfaction were all created by Get Satisfaction staff.

I said this before in my comment on the post at 37 Signals and I will say it again: Yes, in fact, people - who do not work at Get Satisfaction - do start up a section for a company and add the logo themselves to make it recognizable.

I, if memory serves correctly, started the section on Mozilla Thunderbird. If I didn’t start it, I’m pretty sure I’m the one who went & found the logo.

Perhaps an analogy will help:

Get Satisfaction is like Wikipedia for product & service support.

Just as people create a page & add in missing info - such as logos - on Wikipedia, so too do they do it on Get Satisfaction.

Should people sue Wikipedia? No, that’s just silly. It’s helpful and provides an alternative source of information, frequently accurate and often faster to navigate than the subject’s own website. I find Get Satisfaction to be similar for questions, ideas & praise around the products & services I use.

Zeldman Does It Right

April 01, 2009 at 10:29 PM by Scott Vandehey

Garrett, to address your point about how 37 Signals could have handled this a little more gently, I always think about Zeldman when I’m about to complain about a company. His post about his Flickr Pro account expiring has always seemed to me to be the greatest example of that fine balance between acknowledging your own role in a mishap, and clearly letting your target know that you’re disappointed in the experience, without assigning intent to what happened:

http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/27/flickd-away/

Note that he has every reason to be hopping mad here, but the tone of his post is more like “Gee, I probably did something dumb here, but it seems to me that it would be really helpful if you guys did XYZ to help me avoid doing this dumb thing.”

It’s a nice tactful way of pointing out a problem without saying “Hey! You guys are doing it wrong and I hate you!”

Also, he followed up his original post with another detailing what he learned and how the situation changed after his post.

http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/28/my-friend-flickr/

Logo Usage

April 02, 2009 at 10:16 AM by Robert

Dinah: It doesn’t really matter who uploaded the logo, GS is hosting that logo, making the support page look official. It still exists on GS’s servers which they are in control of.

It’s company identity theft and the fact that people, such as the one who runs this blog, sees it as no big deal is a sad day for the design/development community.

Steal a logo, steal a name, steal a design, and then put up a blog post that says “Man those people who got mad because their identity was stolen are the bad guys.”

Not Wikipedia

April 02, 2009 at 10:38 AM by Five Minute Argument

I think the comparison with wikipedia is unfair. Few people, if any, are going to visit a page describing a company on wikipedia and think it’s officially anything to do with that company at all. Wikipedia is widely known; GS is not. I honestly don’t think GS actually intends any malice here - I think this is just a really bad judgement error.

I made no claims about the logos...

April 02, 2009 at 02:51 PM by Garrett Dimon

Robert - I never said the logo usage was “no big deal”. In fact, if you had read thoroughly, you would see that I explicitly stated that I had no business saying whether it was right, wrong, fair use, or otherwise, and as a result would leave that up to others.

The only thing I ever was concerned about was that it was an over reaction on Jason’s part. The blog post and fallout from the blog post was not proportional on any level to the harm done.

Had Jason simply sent an email and talked to them about the changes, instead of spending two days dealing with pitchforks and angry mobs, they could have spent that time making the changes, and everyone would have been better off.

The point is that the way it was handled just made things worse with no real benefit. To some Get Satisfaction looked bad. To others, Jason and 37signals looked bad. The changes would have happened regardless of the path Jason chose. It turned into a lose-lose-win when it could have been a win-win-win all around.

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Hi. I’m Garrett Dimon, a freelance designer/developer in Dallas, TX. This is my site about people, design, and technology. I designed and built a bug and issue tracking application called Sifter. Still have questions? Feel free to .

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