Interesting point about Google "support"

One of Google's paid services Google App Engine failed recently - for 6 hours. For the first time I'm aware, they had a failure in GFS the underlying disk storage subsystem in one of the data centres that runs some of App Engine.

This Register article has an awesome take on it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/06/dziuba_google_app_engine/

Basically his point is that Amazon Cloud had an 8 hour outage last year, but that Amazon gave an excellent review of what happened, where, and what they've done to fix the issue and prevent it from happening again and showing technical details of which line of code that failed; He then contrasts this with Google's response effectively showing a lesson in how to communicate with transparency.

I've recently noticed that taking ownership of a Google Maps local business listing is excruiciatingly difficult. Even once you have claimed your business, its not simple to transfer ownership to a different Google account. It's near impossible. The way its done is to have either a postcard sent to the address, a phone call made to the number listed, or an SMS text message sent to the associated mobile phone, showing that you are bona fide. Sounds like a great system, and it is, but its a pain in the butt. Having already waited about 3 weeks for the postcard, its going to be anotehr 3 weeks since the first one was setup on the wrong account.

For the good post about mergin and transferring Google Accounts, check out this post on combing google accounts: http://blog.dave.org.uk/2008/11/combining-google-accounts.html