Mike Blumenthal

To reinforce the critques in the article I republished from March 2009 about the Google Places customer service experience, I wanted to show a typical, current Dashboard screen shot. The screenshot demonstrates both the lack of meaningful help and the problems that still exist with seeking it out by the small business person. *** I …

Google has recently upgraded their help files and are receiving kudos for their effort. I find the effort, while laudable, very little and very late. I still find the whole Google Places “customer service experience” sorely failing at its primary task: convincing business owners that they are appreciated for something other than their credit card. …

The results are in. I thought that the answers of the single best word to describe Google Places could best be displayed as a Tag Cloud. Like Google uses editorial judgement in showing search results, I used some to determine the relative weight of the words. ambivilation aqueous betterrankfirst bipolar broken capricious clusterf despondful disambiguational …

Google has recently added a “Take our Survey” link to the Places page. I thought that it was a simple 2 question, rate your satisfaction survey with an optional third question (it actually goes on forever). But it was the third question that intrigued me: Describe Google Maps in one word. I love Google Maps. …

Update 7:30 pm: The Google video of Al Franken has “Embedding disabled by request”. Sorry but for reasons that are not totally clear, you will need to head over to YouTube to view this video. Are there any conspiracy theorists in the house? Update 8:17 pm: Apparently, according to @AlanBleiweiss they have also disabled comments. Update 9/29: …

In response to the NY Times article on problems with the process for showing a business as closed that led to spammer induced closings, Google announced that they had pushed a “fix”. Through experimentation, Google’s comments and feedback from Google’s PR folks I have pieced together the likely “flow” for the current closing and the …

Update 5:00 PM EDT: Google employee Vanessagene notes in the forum: “Update: We have a handle on the issue now. Edits made from this point forward should not experience the phone number problem. As for the people that have already been affected, we’re still working on a fix for those accounts. We’ll keep you guys …

Update 5:00 PM EDT: Google employee Vanessagene notes in the forum: “Update: We have a handle on the issue now. Edits made from this point forward should not experience the phone number problem. As for the people that have already been affected, we’re still working on a fix for those accounts. We’ll keep you guys …

Google has just upgraded the Branded Onebox display to allow the user to more easily view either a (very large) thumbnail preview of site or a map. The result defaults to the Map but there is an obvious arrow to guide the user to the preview mode. The preview is significantly larger than the standard …

Bing, in an effort to gain small business mindshare has rolled out a number of upgrades to their Business Portal. In addition to their mixed model approach to deals, they have added very interesting collateral generation capabilities, a loyalty program and a school fund raising program to help promote the effort. The deals product offers …