As one who works from the privacy of my quiet home office, I certainly understand the desire to maintain some anonymity in the virtual workspace. I even understand a company’s preference to manage customer service via email; it is likely more cost/time effective when the bulk of support services are quickly and commonly answered with boilerplate solutions.  Understandably the ROI for tech support on a free service is nill. Regardless, there are issues that simply demand one-on-one support, which brings me to this gripe-of-the-day.

MySpace. Hardly. It’s clearly Their Space. They clearly have no desire to assist users beyond automated and redundant replies to repeated queries.  In nearly 5 months I have been unable to get a profile restored for a client; a profile that was inappropriately deleted — promised to be restored — and still generating error messages.  This is not some personal profile page, mind you; but it is an Official Music artist page for a client who had thousands of “friends” and for whom the profile was a viable marketing tool.

Despite sending the requested “salute” photos — multiple times — and explaining that I have log-in access to the account, they continue to email asking for a “salute” photo to ID the artist.  I was told back in July that the profile and its contents would be restored. JULY!

MySpace Music has proven to be a powerful tool for bands and artists; and yet for one artist it has been rendered completely useless.

Email from MySpace musicsupport August 1, 2008
We have recently experienced a technical difficulty in undeleting profiles within our preferred timeframe We are working diligently to resolve this issue, as it is our top priority to timely process profiles in their entirety and will continue to monitor our systems in order to improve the undeletion process.

Email from MySpace musicsupport on August 28, 2008
The account was undeleted, but the email was rung up, It has been applied again, should be working correctly in 24-48 hrs

Email from MySpace musicsupport on September 5, 2008
All the info is back in place, please try logging in at this time.

Email from MySpace musicsupport on September 10, 2008
Thank you for reporting this issue to us and we apologise for any for any inconvenience this may have caused.   However MySpace.com is currently addressing your profile issue at this time. Until the issue is resolved, we greatly appreciate your patience, and our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Email from MySpace help on November 18, 2008
In order to verify your identity, we need to receive a salute from the owner of the MySpace profile or from the party in question. A salute is a digital image or picture of you holding a handwritten sign that contains information about your MySpace account.

Email from MySpace help on November 26, 2008
Thank you for contacting MySpace.  Please send a new salute which clearly depicts your face and handwritten friend ID number on your sign……

Regarding restoration of deleted content and friends list.  Unfortunately, we do not retain front end information  (blogs, about me information, photos, friends list, etc.).  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

This is absolute BS!

To be continued ….