People! Be Nice! (Or At Least Be Professional)
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009I know I’m not the first one to say it, but I really wish people were a little bit nicer online. Or more considerate. This “story” on Mashable kind of got my goat today:
Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad
So, yeah. If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday. There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade. These things happen. It was not a big deal. It was not the end of the world. The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days. Stop whining, internet.)
So fine. It happened. And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back. And Google explained the whole thing. And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?
So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?
That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.
Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started. And they’re nice. And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).
There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging. That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media. At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.
I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s beef with George Hunka).
But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it? Try Facebook. Or Twitter.
Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say? In which case, maybe keep quiet?
UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day? The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them? That’s some great journalism. Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop! We have a replacement for you!
Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time. Or Twitter! Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error? Or a suggestion of how to improve it?