I have put all my eggs in one basket … and I got burned.
Recently I had an issue with Google, their robots decided that I was a spammer and disabled my account.
My crime: I started a new blog on Blogger promoting free Kindle books.
At first I was annoyed, I had many services tied up to my Google account, my beloved wife (may she live a long life) and I shared a calendar, my GalaxyS phone was backed up to my Google account, Blogger account which was talked about, Adwords, Google reader was my best entertainment and Google search was my engine of choice.
And more…
After several weeks of annoyance, filling out forms on a daily base I realized that this is actually a blessing in disguise. If some machine can make such decisions, with basically no-one to overlook it, no-one to hear an appeal or even an email address which gets seen by a living, breathing human being – it’s probably a bad idea to tie up all these services with one account.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Google’s services are fantastic and enjoy their technology on daily basis. Yet there is something inherently wrong with a company holding so much power over my leisure activities, providing services which make life easier but are not necessary.
What hurt the most was the loss of my Gmail account. Besides the annoying part of opening another one I lost important contacts, emails, eBooks, author interviews and more. I am still recovering from that and I have a feeling that the pain would last for a while.
Alas, such is life – blessings and curses are mixed together creating an interchangeable mash which only time might attempt to untangle and differentiate the indistinguishable.
Zohar – Man of la Book
I think your point about tbe dangers of a no-human process is very well made. Overall, though, tough luck ;( What a pain.
I hope you manage to get everything back.
Nope, not yet but thanks 🙂
Hoping that you can get some of what you lost back. In the mean time, it is great that you see the silver lining.
Aw – that stinks. Sorry for your troubles. 🙁
WOW, it is truth that sometimes life deals us a blessing in disguise – in the form of Google. Hopefully not all will be lost for you. Something must be up at Google cause not long ago they emptied my email accounts, but that was the extent of it – so I didn’t have to deal with emails I had been neglecting anyway.
Google sounds almost like a robot society in a futuristic YA novel, sometimes.
Wow, what a pain. I once had my site “slapped” by Google–it was removed from the search results entirely. To this day I have no idea why!
I have just lost my google account I dont know as to why and I dont care google is just a spy anyway. Thank god yahoo still works google has too much power too much power corrupts.
I had the same problem, my act just ‘disappeared’; google never explained, never even answered. I lost everything including 15 active blogs with four years of history. Fantastic as google maybe, I moved to WordPress and have learned to live with the limitations. I use google as little as possible; I don’t trust them.
AV