I cannot believe that there would be enough trademark complaints that someone doesn't check the persons name before taking away a vanity url and sending such a message.

And if techcrunch had not gotten involved I cannot see them giving the same response to any person.

Also, the apology actually sounds sincere.

(follow up on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071623)

It's amazing what a little media attention to your support issues will do.

We should institutionalize that somehow. Like the public wall of shame of old, a vetting board decides if your issue gets pushed down the pipeline and all the news outlets subscribe to it.

That could create some serious consumer power.

If you were to bundle the facebook complaints, the google complaints and so on then by virtue of the cumulative effect it would be newsworthy again.

But you're right that 'making it normal' would detract from the newsworthiness, so you'd have to combat that by sheer volume.

Or, one could run it something like how Stack Overflow is run, with a community voting on what issues are most deserving of attention, and helping to solve the issues and get the word out. Then the media could just skim the issues that were voted up the most from time to time, when they're having a slow news day.

Everybody should have at least 10000 followers on Twitter.

The faux-pas was actually made by Harman's PR person. If he had shut up everything would have gone smoothly.