Now it needs tremendous publicity. This is one place to start, but it needs significantly more effort.

Thanks for taking action on my suggestions buddy, but we will need someone like Mike Blumenthal to spearhead this if we hope to have any chance of it going viral.

A petition on your website or my website isn’t gonna cut it. I also don’t see the need to publicly collect (or possibly publish) people’s email addresses. Many would consider that list building or, at worst, an open invitation to spammers if all of our email addresses were publicly available on the petition website.

We would really only need the wording for the petition, a check box to say you agree, and a few fields to fill out such as; name, country, and possibly our website if we wanted it displayed. Once we hit the submit button, our name is recorded and added to the ever growing list of petitioners… the list that the whole world would now be able to see, including Google.

Mike, what say you?

Instead of all of us consultants, agencies, SEOs and SMBs continuously bitching about the mismanagement of Places (year after year after year after year), why don’t we setup a standalone website where all of us can can sign an online petition against Google totally ignoring the ongoing major issues inside Places?

If we could pull this off, and get it to go viral, we would have one central location (besides their stupid a** forums) where we can all add posts (by the tens of thousands) of our disgust with Google’s total disregard of the livelihood of millions of real people that own and run millions of real businesses worldwide.

Between the tens of thousands of us pissed off and fed up consultants, agencies, and SEOs, representing millions of SMBs worldwide, Google and Marissa Mayer will no longer be able to code themselves out the mess they’ve created. Nor will they be able to ignore the firestorm we would ignite on the web if thousands of us posted press releases, videos, tweets, articles, Facebook posts, blog posts, etc., all pointing back to the petition and attack site we setup.

Instead of being the victims for one more day, let’s start a viral online campaign against Google and their ignorant treatment of all of us. Let’s attack them where it counts; THEIR Reputation, and THEIR Pocketbook!

Let’s see how THEY like it!!!

Facebook has a similar process with Page names that have all CAPS such as an acronym.

Unless this information is palatable to the masses and re-posted on gizmodo.com and engadget.com to cause a stink, it is doubtful that change will happen. Yet look how quickly Google and Facebook made privacy changes when the masses caused an uproar.

They do know it but their typical response is to fix the code so it scales not fix human sized problems. But many of the current problems are ones that really need a trained human to interact with even if only briefly to solve/resolve/approve/unmerge.

The forum is in fact just that for them. A way to measure pain points not to solve problems. The convoluted path noted above is the result of that…. humans work to solve their problems. Google works to enhance code. They think of forums as a way to enhance their code… humans (like me) keep poking and prodding until it works for them…. resulting in the above mess…

@Kevin
There is a rhyme or reason. There always is when it is a computer delivering results. But don’t feel bad, you are amongst good company in your inability to understand what the reason is.

@EarlPearl
I created it at a size big enough that she could print out and pin to her wall if she so desires.