Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.
GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.
There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.
One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.
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Logging on to Gmail or other e-mail service has become a routine of daily life, completed without a thought. What would you do, however, if you woke up tomorrow, plugged in your user name and password as you always do, but then received an unfamiliar message: “User name and password do not match”?
If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.
Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts.
Tom Lynch, a software entrepreneur who lives near Austin, Tex., discovered early last month that he had been locked out of both Gmail accounts he used; he had no idea why. He received boilerplate instructions for recovering his accounts that did not apply to his particular circumstances, which included his failing to maintain a non-Gmail e-mail account as a back-up. He said it took him four weeks, including the use of a business directory and talking with anyone he could find at Google, before he succeeded in having service restored.
A Google spokesman placed the blame on Mr. Lynch, saying he did not follow Google’s guidelines. The spokesman characterized Mr. Lynch’s ordeal as a praiseworthy illustration of Google’s tough security: “We have had no cases of falsely recovered accounts.”
Google does provide phone support to Gmail customers who subscribe to Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 annually and includes larger storage quotas and other benefits. Customers who use the advertising-supported version of Gmail, however, must rely solely on what Google calls “self-service online support.”
Microsoft and Yahoo similarly offer phone support only to their premium e-mail customers. (Yahoo says it offers phone support for its free e-mail service “in some cases,” but it does not publish the phone number; it is revealed to the user in distress only after e-mail communication fails to resolve the problem.)
Last month, Google’s official blog dispensed advice for those unfortunate souls who find themselves locked out. The post, “What to do if you can’t access your Webmail,” scolded users about not sharing passwords with anyone, pointed customers to a form to reset the password and, if that doesn’t solve the problem, to another form to start the “account recovery process.”
As customers, we bring the same expectations to Google’s personalized information services, like Gmail or Google Docs, its word-processing service, as we do to our bank’s Web site. These are places that hold information very dear to us. My bank recognizes that losing access for days at a time is unacceptable. It provides me with round-the-clock phone support for account problems. So, too, should Google, even if I pay the company not in the form of a monthly account fee, but with my attention, which Google commercializes by selling slices to its advertisers.
Last month, with cases like Mr. Lynch’s in mind, I contacted Google to see what the company had to say about my suggestion that it add phone support for its customers with account-related problems. The company returned with a debate team of three to argue the negative position: Matthew Glotzbach, who works with Google’s business customers; Roy Gilbert, who handles consumers; and Greg Badros, who is an engineering director.
Mr. Glotzbach began by saying that “one-to-one support isn’t always the best answer” because it would take Google too long to collect lots of data about a problem that is affecting many users simultaneously.
For systemic problems, data collection is important. But not for other categories. Account recovery could be slow for a locked-out customer who doesn’t have a backup e-mail account, and who declined to provide a security question and answer because of concerns that someone else could use it to get in (which is what someone did to Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account).
Mr. Badros argued that Google asks so little personal information of a new Gmail customer that it’s hard to determine identity when the genuine user and the impostor both present themselves to claim the account, and neither can produce the verification. He said more information could be asked of users when they sign up, but the inconvenience would dissuade them from trying the service.
Mr. Gilbert added that proving identity with only minimal information is a problem, whatever form of communication is used to reach customer support. He said, “Even if they were standing right in front of us, it wouldn’t help.”
THIS makes sorting out competing claims seem permanently hopeless, when, of course, this is not the case; it simply means that standard security questions will not suffice. But if Google were to use real people to sort out identity problems over the phone, the only remaining consideration would be the one that Google’s panel of experts didn’t mention in our talk: cost.
Google says it has “tens of millions” of Gmail customers. (It declines to be more specific.) If it’s willing to consider phone support for account-access emergencies, it can take heart in the example of Netflix, which last year adopted phone support with enthusiasm, replacing online support completely. For all customers. For all problems. And without resorting to an offshore call center.
It turns out that a staff of 375 customer service representatives are enough to handle calls from Netflix’s 8.4 million customers, answering most calls within a minute. Netflix says with justifiable pride that it has received the top ratings in online retail customer satisfaction by both Nielsen Online and ForeSee Results.
A Netflix spokesman explained the complete switch to phone support: “Most people don’t need customer service,” he said, “but when they do, they want it now.”
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It’s been roughly 18 months since the last major change to the entry to AOL.com. Now, after revamping its verticals and launching new products like women’s site Lemondrop, AOL is trying a new approach to its portal entry: creating an info hub for third-party email services and social nets while integrating RSS, local news and pop-out “engagement modules.”
The first phase went live tonight with an e-mail module allowing users to check on AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail accounts from the top right-hand of AOL.com and expanded left-hand navigation to various points within AOL. Over the next few weeks, AOL will add an innovative global status update for major social services—write your status once and it shows up on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter at the same time—and the ability to follow multiple social net activity through one module from AOL’s front page. Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of programming, walked me through the new front page.
The changes don’t stop with e-mail and social nets. Some are skin deep as AOL introduces new color schemes and a more stylish approach, swapping muted pastels for options that include black backgrounds. (Screenshot here.) It may sound purely cosmetic but it gives the portal a new look and feel even tough the basic structure remains the same. On the top left, people can add their own links. AOL Radio will get a top spot. AOL.com also will incorporate “engagement modules” or pop-up players for video, photo galleries, polls and the like that can be moved to other locations on the page to watch video while reading email or the like.
It is an insanely long page but Wilson insists that their click maps show users scroll “if you provide value in the middle of the page as well as the bottom.” Much more detail after the jump.
More on e-mail
Hovering over an e-mail service after login shows the latest messages; composing messages or viewing all mail in an account takes the user off the page. Microsoft’s Hotmail poses a problem though; it can’t be accessed or previewed through AOL.com so AOL is providing a link that can be inserted in one of the module email slots—and a link to Microsoft feedback so people can ask for the feature. In addition to being more open, AOL hopes the e-mail aggregation will help recapture some of the user attention it lost before people leaving the ISP were allowed to keep their AOL addresses. Make it possible for Yahoo e-mail users to scan their inbox from AOL.com and they may stick around.
Leveraging acquisitions
Some of the new content on the front page comes from integrating AOL’s acquisitions. For instance, local news, something AOL hasn’t highlighted before, will be powered by Relegence, the financial news and info technology firm acquired by AOL in late 2006. Relegence, which pulls news and info from more than 3,000 sources, is already powering AOL’s finance, sports and entertainment coverage. Wilson says the portal avoided local news until now because news from nearby big cities tended to overwhelm the result. AOL will use Relegence to provide real-time news pegged to zip codes: “We’re really going to lean into local here.”
– An RSS reader in a module at the bottom will start default categories but can be supplemented by user choices. Recent acquisition Sphere will provide related content from the web; it was integrated quietly into AOL News last week and will be launched across AOL’s network.
Personalization not the goal
Wilson: “We’re not trying to create a replacement for myAOL or iGoogle or My Yahoo. … Based on our experience, personalized sites range usually to under 20 percent of the mainstream. If you look at My Yahoo, it does 20 million where My Yahoo does 90 millions; myAOL is roughly 8 million where our portal is about 48 million. Here, we’re trying to create an experience of great scale for the masses.” Beginning in Q109, though, the front page will start to respond to use. “If you as a user never click on finance news, we would swap that module out and provide you a different module based on things you do click on.” For instance, someone who clicks on style but not finance might get a style feed.
– The e-mail aggregator, social net module and other new features will be available eventually for myAOL.
Advertising
AOL is keeping the 300×600 display ad introduced for the Olympics and is testing placement for sponsored link ads from another acquisition, Quigo. The ads currently are integrated in various modules but the new look has them bundled together on the bottom left. “We’re constantly working with Quigo to determine the best placement for monetization but also leveraging that with the consumer experience.” The engagement modules “are all going to be highly customized from a sponsorship standpoint with rich media. We’ve been sharing that with TV networks and movie studios and some of the CPG as well as retailers.” That’s new advertising in the middle of the screen that doesn’t exist today. Will it pay off in revenue? The inventory being added should provide a boost.
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