r+d

Great example of humor being used in customer service/experience communications.

While I'm sure Quora, Foursquare et al didn't think the outage at Amazon was all that funny, Amazon is known for being one of the most reliable web/cloud services providers in the world. This outage was the exception, not the rule. As long as this outage doesn't foretell a more serious, long-term degradation of reliability, a little humor can sometimes go a long way toward warming customer relationships back up.

Amazon has officially denied that the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms was the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems' Skynet sentient computer system, declaring humanity safe after all. Yesterday's outage, which took down the image storage services for a raft of major websites including question-and-answer site Quora, location-based social network Foursquare, and Twitter app Hootsuite, was noted by some to come on the day that Terminator TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles claimed would herald the start of Skynet's war against humanity.

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Filed under // Amazon customer service humor tech

The phone book was the first Facebook

I guess it had to happen. Someone finally wrote an entire book about the phone book. Leave no stone unturned, right? Well as it turns out, there's a great lesson in the history of the phone book for innovators. When asked about innovations that changed the world, most folks conjure up thoughts of things like the light bulb, telephones, cars, etc. But how about the lowly phone book? Actually, it was pretty amazing - primarily for the cultural change it symbolized and helped usher in.

From the article at Reason:

Phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.

Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. “Hey strangers!” anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. “Here’s how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are.”

Its immediate effect was that it facilitated commerce. For businesses, phone directory advertising would evolve into a crucial business tool. It reached the same mass audiences that newspaper and magazine advertising did, but it was cheaper, more persistent, easier to manage: Place one ad and you got a steady stream of inquiries all year long. For consumers, phone directory advertising was an even bigger boon. It gave them a comprehensive overview of the choices that were available to them for any given product or service, an efficient way to comparison shop. It made commerce more accessible and thus more competitive.

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Filed under // Amazon Facebook culture phone book privacy

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Skynet not to blame for AWS fail

The phone book was the first Facebook