Amusing interaction on the last.fm forums. Concerning bugs in the current last.fm client on Leopard, a member of staff writes:

We’re aware of there being a fuckload of problems concerning the client and Leopard. Fear not, for work shall be focused on ironing these bugs out in the coming days.

Which brings the following customer responses:

Is this what passes for professionalism on Web 2.0?

and

Paying or not, we’re customers, and we deserve to be treaded with some professionalism.

As a testament to how poorly that language can be received, just witness how this support thread has degraded since the post.

Seeing this, I’m now a FORMER last.fm customer. While one customer may not matter in the short term, every customer does count to a healthy business.

The same last.fm staff member then makes things just a little bit worse with the following rather sarcastic apology:

I hereby apologise to the tiny fraction of the 5% of our userbase who are Mac users for offending them by the use of the word “fuckload.” We’ll try and be more corporate and sterile in future.

To be fair there were at least as many posts from people who didn’t find the language offensive, or even liked it. But the whole mess could have been avoided by simply using, say, “shedload” in the original post, which would have kept the character of the post without causing offense. It pays to remember that on the big old Internet not everyone shares the same values.