Why Twitter maybe isn't the right choice for tech support

This post stems from my stupid typing error caused by trying to do 3 things at once. I admit that I made the mistake. What I'm lamenting is that 4 days later, I can't actually find a way to resolve the problem.

So what happened? I got my Jolicloud closed beta ID. Woot! I'm very pleased to have received it and I rushed to register my account and get the download going. This is where the error occured. In typing in my email address I manager to add an extra 'i' so that I ended up with a .co.uik domain and not the .co.uk I actually own. The upshot is, that I can't get the verification email so I can't complete registering my account and can't download the software.

I do maintain that a well designed website would have been checking for legitimate domains and would have used double entry to ensure it correctly captured the email address ... but still, it was my typo.

So my first thought was 'DOH'. My second thought was 'I'll email support and they'll rescue me'. There's the problem. Jolicloud don't have an email address for their support, only a twitter address. That's the problem. Twitter is not the best place to discuss account detail, or invite codes, and despite the fact that I'm following jolisupport on twitter, since they aren't following me back I can't send them a direct (and therefore secure) message ... so I raked over their site and found the general contact email address usually reserved for press queries (judging from the topic pull-down) which worked as well as I feared: 4 days and no reply.

The invitation email says "We provide (almost) live support via our Twitter support channel: http://twitter.com/jolisupport." So I decided to try an @jolisupport asking if there's a secure way to handle account support, but no answer yet.

Lesson? Don't use an unsecure or public support solution unless you provide a secure solution for account related stuff, and, write your forms with validation built in, especially if you rely on it for identity verification, oh ... the obvious one ... when you're filling in a form with important information, check it *before* you submit it!

Here's hoping *someone* from the Jolicloud team gets back to me, as I'm hoping to review it and finally see some competition for Ubuntu 9.04.