Google Gets Back to Nick
Nick Saber just forwarded Google’s eventual response to what went wrong. Because thousands of people wanted to know the answer to the question why, here’s the first part of that letter:
Hello Nick,
I understand that you may have questions about the recent actions taken on your Google Account. We understand and respect your concerns about your account.
Our specialists performed a thorough investigation of your account ID: nick.saber@gmail.com. It appeared that your account was compromised on 08/01, and an unauthorized charge of $490.30 was attempted in your Google Checkout Account. For security purposes, we suspended this account to prevent additional activity and charges.
We’d also like to assure you that the security and confidentiality of your personal information, including your credit card number, is our highest priority. Your information is securely stored on our servers, and won’t be shared with anyone except under the very limited circumstances described
in our Privacy Policy at http://checkout.google.com/files/buyerprivacy.html. To learn more about
the security of your account and personal information, please visit http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29075.We also understand your concerns regarding your account security. It is difficult to determine the exact nature of your account compromise. Please see below for useful information on safeguarding yourself online.
The rest of the letter reminds us not to fall into phishing scams, etc. Good advice.
But wow. Couldn’t this have started with an email saying, “Looks like someone was messing with your account. We shut it down to investigate.” Seems a little backwards to make Nick sweat for a day and change, only to reveal that someone tried to rip him off, and THAT’S why they shut him down.
Special note: Matt Cutts came by with lots of information once this story broke, and I’m grateful for that. Note to ALL companies: if you don’t have a respected face person like Matt out there, think about it. It does help.
What’s your take? How would you have handled it, if you were Google?
Lastly, I’m going to talk about this a bit more in my next newsletter, so if you’re not already subscribed, hop in!
Three Photo Editing Tools to Check Out
I just learned about Dumpr from Download Squad. It’s a tool that offers free and pro photo editing options. Checking out this site reminded me to tell you that I’m also pretty fond of some other great web tools that you might not be using.
- A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.
- Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.
- Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.
More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.
What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?
Alert Thingy Helps Make FriendFeed Indispensible
I have a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, Facebook, and lots of other points of presence on the web. FriendFeed is one application that lets people see all your various output in one place. Now, with the new application, Alert Thingy, I can see your FriendFeed presence in a nifty little Adobe AIR application.
FriendFeed/AlertThingy makes seeing the larger media output of your friends easier. Does this help you in a given day? Hard to say. But because some of the comments of the web are shifting into FriendFeed and because the audience is becoming more and more atomized, tools like these are becoming important to seeing the larger story.
Presence apps are here. Aggregation apps are here. But when do we get triage and filtering? Attention is scarce, and we’re sacrificing more of it every day. Tools like Alert Thingy are half the solution by putting everything in one place. But who will help us human-filter our sources?
Found via TechCrunch.
Screen caps done with Plasq’s Skitch
Web Side Sales Application for Small Business
Eventually, a good chunk of what we do will be on the web. For me, it already is. So, as applications come available that might be useful for one’s day to day, I like to peek at them and see the state of things.
One such application is Oprius. If you are a solo practitioner, or work in a small organization, and need to figure out how to build a sales/marketing practice, dOprius might be the right scale marketing campaign platform for you. It does a variety of things in a very integrated fashion, including letting you build call scripts for folks who have to hit the phones.
My favorite part of the application is contained in the graphic above, the “Phone Assistant.” Upon bringing up someone’s contact, there are some other fields for more information, a lot of ways to capture other data about the conversation.
The company is working towards engaging in conversations with their prospective community, so if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.
