Jock Murphy Words and PicturesThe writing and photography of Jock Murphy

It has only taken a month but at long last the description of the book on Amazon is now correct.

I have a more liberal definition of Web 2.0 than perhaps the Weberatti (to coing a term) do. I see it as the phase of the web were one (and in this case that one is me) can aggregate components together (both programatically AND manually) to get things done. Like say, the book. So far the experience has been positive, mostly. The problem is when you need help.

Lulu has no formal way to contact support. Instead you have to post in the forums and they promise that support will respond within 24 hours. The problem is that this I have never had this happen that quickly. More than once my post has fallen though the cracks and I had to post to it myself to get attention. I get what they are doing, most support questions are simple and they are trying to foster a community. Sometimes you can't help yourself and you need someone official to talk too. Note: As I write this I notice that they do now have a "Live Help" feature though it is currently offline. I hope this means things are improving.

Like many others I believe in loosely-coupled discreet components, and in social software. However the problem is that these things both carry with them a heavier support burden (a lesson I learned well from founding Pocket-Monkey). For small companies, and open source projects this can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Support is far too often a thankless task of answering a question for the 1000th time that person asking was capable of finding out themselves (One of the most common support questions on involves people forgetting their password, and there is a link title "I forgot my password" right next to the login button).

Social communities are great ways of providing bottom up support, but I have learned the hard way that they are no panacea. Here are some of the things I have learned:

• Have a clear was to contact support
• Set expectations realistically. If you don't say when you will respond, people assume it will be immediate.
• If you make a promise, keep it. If you say you will respond within 24 hours, then by god send some kind of response within 24 hours.
• No broken windows. If something doesn't work and there is no impression that it is being fixed, then it makes users feel the site has been abandoned. Or to put it another way, if you don't care for the site, why should they?
• Keep the community civil. Online communities can get elitist and nasty very quickly. If they get this way, people will be afraid to ask for help. Moderation is part of the solution, but it is better to keep it from getting to that point. You and your community leaders should make it a point to be the voice of calm and reason whenever anything gets too hot.

So far these are just the hard lessons we have to learn over and over again, with no loosely couple component to do it for us. Hmm...