{"id":1128,"date":"2009-09-02T13:10:46","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T17:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2009-09-02T13:22:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T17:22:10","slug":"people-be-nice-or-at-least-be-professional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/2009\/09\/people-be-nice-or-at-least-be-professional\/","title":{"rendered":"People! Be Nice! (Or At Least Be Professional)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know I’m not the first one to say it, but I really wish people were a little bit nicer online.\u00a0 Or more considerate.\u00a0 This “story” on Mashable<\/a> kind of got my goat today:<\/p>\n

Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

So, yeah.\u00a0 If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday.\u00a0 There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade.\u00a0 These things happen.\u00a0 It was not a big deal.\u00a0 It was not the end of the world.\u00a0 The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days.\u00a0 Stop whining, internet.)<\/p>\n

So fine.\u00a0 It happened.\u00a0 And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back.\u00a0 And Google explained the whole thing.\u00a0\u00a0 And issued a huge apology.<\/a> Seems like that should be it, right?<\/p>\n

So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one big oops Google. But it\u2019s nice to see that you\u2019re 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\u2019s hoping you stick to that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started.\u00a0 And they’re nice.\u00a0 And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process<\/a>).<\/p>\n

There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging.\u00a0 That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media.\u00a0 At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 beef with George Hunka<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0 Try Facebook.\u00a0 Or Twitter.<\/p>\n

Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say?\u00a0 In which case, maybe keep quiet?<\/p>\n

UPDATE: <\/strong>Erick Schonfeld <\/a>at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day?\u00a0 The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog<\/a> and then bitch about them?\u00a0 That’s some great journalism.\u00a0 Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop!\u00a0 We have a replacement for you!<\/p>\n

Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time.\u00a0 Or Twitter!\u00a0 Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error?\u00a0 Or a suggestion of how to improve it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know I’m not the first one to say it, but I really wish people were a little bit nicer online.\u00a0 Or more considerate.\u00a0 This “story” on Mashable kind of got my goat today: Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad So, yeah.\u00a0 If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[452,255,70,453,454],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants-and-raves","tag-blogging","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-mashable","tag-outage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1130,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions\/1130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffclarke.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}