My computer, my beloved Magpie, is off to the Apple Service Center to be repaired. Light a little candle for me, so that Magpie comes back without a wiped HD, please. PLEASE.

What this means: posts will be sporadic at best for the next week, week and a half. Email will be pretty nil. Also, I will lose touch with EVERYTHING. Except when I'm at work. And I can't work on my MA paper, which isn't the end of the world, but it certainly is annoying.

This weekend in Minnesota was wonderful, and it got me thinking, as I poked around on ShareThis.com, FeedBurner, and Google Analytics, only the first of which was working to my satisfaction when interacting with Blogger. And here's the question:
How do you hold a company that provides you with a free service accountable for the quality of that service?

Something to consider: when a roommate, significant other, friend, family member, or other person that one may feel relatively close to treats you in a manner you don't appreciate, does something to hurt your feelings, continually "forgets" or skips out on seeing you, doesn't pay you back, etc, etc, what do you do? Well, if you're not passive aggressive, aggressive, or otherwise inclined, the first time (maybe the first two or three times), you may ignore it, justify it, or otherwise sweep it under the rug of your relationship. The next few times may lead to confrontation of some kind, either calm or not, but most people will make their feelings on the situation known. In the imaginary world of everything going right, the situation is resolve quickly, if it comes up at all. In reality, you lose friends, break up with significant others, avoid family members and move away from roommates.

But what happens when a company that provides a free service patronizes you, marginalizes you, craps out on you, and takes away services without warning? What recourse do consumers of free products and services have? Mostly, at least since Google has begun to take over the world, they can go to a message board and complain. That rarely gets the attention of a help desk or company employee, let alone gets the problem solved. And while I love seeing the Twitter Fail Whale and going to check that handy Twitter blog to see what's up, being told that the service is down and "it's being worked on" does little for my frustration.

The case of Google is even more interesting. Despite service outages, randomly malfunctioning services, and a rather lackluster performance on less central offerings like FeedBurner, Analytics, and in particular AdSense, Google is still dominating in customer service surveys. How does that happen? Well, it's easy to say that most of the time, Google's service is pretty good (and it is) BUT, that's only true for the more central services like G-mail and Google Documents. How well do we really think the Android is going to do, if Google doesn't throw all of its support and celebrity behind it? And, despite the problems that Apple has had recently, with their stock prices, Jobs illness, iPhone/MobileMe debacle, and the Nano announcement, does Google have the following that Apple and Crackberry have? I don't think so.

But back to the original point. How do you get a free service to respect you and continue to give you the service that you so richly deserve desire? Working for a company that has something similar to many other offerings, I know that the point of providing the service (even for free, despite Twitter) is to make money. And if you don't give people the services they want, they will take their business, and the advertisers, elsewhere (More on this later, when I have more time). There's too much competition out there, even for services as awesome and overall good as GMail, FaceBook, and Blogger. Look at the exodus from MySpace...(But ignore this.) So besides flaming companies, besides trying to get prominent bloggers to bash them so they'll shape up, besides trusting them to do the right thing, and besides switching services...are there any other options? A Consumerist.com for free stuff?

There's always the option of turning of the computer. (Ha.)