Phew! That was close

I thought that I'd never again see this blog. I screwed up my profile by carelessly adding a Google gadget into my Wall. Kudos to the tech support - they were on the case and had me sorted out in two days. I hadn't expected that because my experience with Facebook support is that they never respond. I had asked them two routine questions eight months ago; change the name on my profile and create a network. It never happened!

Anyway, I had been bedevilled with technical problems for the past week. Besides corrupting this profile, I forgot which e-mail address I had associated with another profile on a different network and locked myself out of that. In a related matter, I attempted to change the service provider for my Blackberry from O2 to 3. It didn't work and the response from each of the three agencies involved wasn't helpful - each one arguing that one of the other two was at fault.

This is related to what I'm investigating here. This distributed development platform has a similar risk; your code sitting on one server making calls to libraries sitting on Google's servers and being accessed through a container on a third server (Ning, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace, etc). I'm not looking forward to finding out what's wrong with something that doesn't work.