Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android

If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?

Google executives acknowledge that robotic vision is a “moonshot.” But it appears to be more realistic than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service, which Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, revealed in a television interview the evening before one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.

The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.

At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.

A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

Google has recently started experimenting with package delivery in urban areas with its Google Shopping service, and it could try to automate portions of that system. The shopping service, available in a few locations like San Francisco, is already making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and American Eagle Outfitters.

Perhaps someday, there will be automated delivery to the doorstep, which for now is dependent on humans.

“Like any moonshot, you have to think of time as a factor,” Mr. Rubin said. “We need enough runway and a 10-year vision.”

Mr. Rubin, the 50-year-old Google executive in charge of the new effort, began his engineering career in robotics and has long had a well-known passion for building intelligent machines. Before joining Apple Computer, where he initially worked as a manufacturing engineer in the 1990s, he worked for the German manufacturing company Carl Zeiss as a robotics engineer.

“I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Mr. Rubin said in a telephone interview. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

He used the example of a windshield wiper that has enough “intelligence” to operate when it rains, without human intervention, as a model for the kind of systems he is trying to create. That is consistent with a vision put forward by the Google co-founder Larry Page, who has argued that technology should be deployed wherever possible to free humans from drudgery and repetitive tasks.

The veteran of a number of previous Silicon Valley start-up efforts and twice a chief executive, Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.

Earlier this year, Mr. Rubin stepped down as head of the company’s Android smartphone division. Since then he has convinced Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Mr. Page, that the time is now right for such a venture, and they have opened Google’s checkbook to back him. He declined to say how much the company would spend.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2013

An article on Wednesday about Google’s increasing investment in robotics, including the acquisition of technology companies related to the field, misspelled the name of one such acquisition, a small design firm that makes high-tech wheels. It is Holomni, not Holonomi.

Bits Blog: The Numbers Behind Twitter

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Bits Blog: The New Economics Behind the Oracle-Dell Partnership

Kimihiro Hoshino/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This week, Dell and Oracle announced a partnership unique to both companies. Dell would offer Oracle software on its machines and would resell Oracle services. Much head-scratching ensued among industry analysts, largely over misunderstandings about where the industry was headed.

What bothered many of these analysts was the idea that both Dell and Oracle sell commodity servers based on Intel’s x86 reference designs. Oracle picked up that business when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Sun was never a big player in that business, however, having come to it late and grudgingly. It always preferred its own machines, which used the Sparc chip.

From the Sun deal, Oracle got many loyal (or locked-in) Sparc customers and insights to make the combined hardware and software “engineered systems” that advanced its in-memory data and analytics products. If it ever wanted to compete with Dell or Hewlett-Packard on commodity servers, it doesn’t want to now. In its third fiscal quarter, Oracle had hardware revenue of $671 million, down 23 percent. Much of that was faltering x86 sales.

What Oracle still wants, and Dell can offer, is exposure to smaller and midsize companies, which Oracle’s high-ticket sales force has trouble reaching.

“Oracle has a phenomenal engine into the top 500 enterprise accounts worldwide,” said Marius Haas, the head of Dell’s enterprise business. “They’d like to go after the broader market, and we’ve got a great relationship with companies there.”

There is also some bad blood behind this story: Mr. Haas worked at Hewlett-Packard when Mark Hurd was its chief executive. He left during Léo Apotheker’s brief tenure at the top of H.P., after Mr. Hurd’s resignation in August 2010.

So putting a little more pressure on H.P. probably sweetened the deal. Mr. Haas said this week’s announcement could lead to Dell selling even more Oracle products, both applications and databases. It appears to be the first time that Oracle has entrusted another company to sell its services. Even Oracle’s enemies like SAP and I.B.M. resell Oracle databases.

More important is what the deal says about selling hardware these days: Compared with even five years ago, companies are being forced to add more capabilities to their products.

It’s not just that Oracle is fusing high-performance hardware and software, or Dell is shipping servers preloaded with Oracle products.

At the bottom of the food chain, Taiwanese companies like Quanta and Delta, which used to make motherboards that go inside servers, now sell shrink-wrapped racks of servers for big data centers. No one there cares about the brand; they care about price. Even below any kind of systems level, Intel is increasing the capability of its chips and buying software companies.

Thanks to clouds, mobility, sensors and big networks, there is so much computing around now that it has changed everyone’s economics. For a while, that creates new alliances and tensions.

Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind

Nick Bilton/The New York Times The writer’s dinner guests place their smartphones in a stack in the middle of the table.

If you were to meet 32-year-old Robin Sloan of San Francisco, you might think him a Luddite unable to get his head around new technologies. He owns an old Nokia phone with one main application: making phone calls. He takes notes using a pen and paper notepad. And he reads books printed on paper.

But Mr. Sloan is far from a Luddite. He used to work at Twitter as a media manager, teaching news outlets to use the hottest social media tools. Before that he was with Current TV as an online strategist, inventing the future of digital journalism.

Yet last year, as he set out to write his first book, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” he found his iPhone and other technologies were getting in the way of his productivity, so he simply got rid of them. “I found it was more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes,” he said. “I needed my idle minutes to contribute to the story I was doing, not checking my e-mail, or checking tweets.”

Even in Silicon Valley, Mr. Sloan has company.

As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels.

I’ve experienced this, too.

Two years ago, when the iPhone and iPad were spiking in popularity, when I dined with other technology bloggers and reporters we enthusiastically passed our phones around the table, showing off the latest app or funny YouTube clip.

Now, even as our gadgets can hold more apps and stream faster videos, when I’m at dinner with technologists we play a new game. Attendees happily place their smartphones in a stack in the middle of the table, and the first person who touches his or her phone before the meal is over has to pay the bill.

Some couples who work in tech seem to be trying to step back the most.

“At least once a month my wife and I jump in our car and drive until cell service drops off (yes, this is possible) and spend the weekend engaged with all things analog,” Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, said — on e-mail. “We read, we walk all over the California hills, we cook, we meet people who don’t work in technology.”

Other couples have told me of a “no gadgets in the bedroom” rule. (Kindles are sometimes an exception.) Some say they leave their phones at home when they go for Sunday brunch. Rather than take a picture of their bacon and eggs to post to Instagram, they can now enjoy each other’s company, and do that strange thing called talking.

There could even be a business model in products that encourage us to step away from our gadgets.

Last Tuesday, Penguin Press published “The Pocket Scavenger,” a book both physical and digital that encourages readers to go on an unusual scavenger hunt, collecting random objects, drawing and smudging on the book’s pages, then documenting them later with a smartphone.

“We’re not going to get rid of technology,” said Keri Smith, the author. “I feel like we’ve lost touch with noticing smells and tactile sensations, and I’d just like to offer some kind of antidote to what’s out there.”

As for Mr. Sloan, who has since published his book, he said his break from technology was a resounding success. He still checks his e-mail, but not while he’s getting coffee with someone or going for a stroll.

Although he isn’t rushing off to buy the next iPhone, he said he wouldn’t rule it out. But he would use such a device differently than he did before downgrading his cellphone.

“It sounds silly because we all used to do this all the time, but after getting rid of my smartphone I am now so much more comfortable just leaving the house without any phone at all,” he said. “I feel like I kind of learned how to do that again, and I would do the same thing if I had a fancy new smartphone too.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Boom Times in Paraguay Leave Many Behind

But just a few minutes away by car one recent morning, grandmothers waded through raw sewage in the labyrinthine slum of La Chacarita, scavenging copper wire and aluminum cans to sell at scrap yards.

“Tell me about this growth,” said Cecilia Aguirre, 60, grasping a plastic bag holding her day’s takings, worth about $4. Squinting under the hot sun, she said she worked every day to feed the four grandchildren who live in her home. Asked about Paraguay’s robust economy, she added, “I’ve heard of no such thing in my lifetime.”

Indeed, Paraguay’s economic boom, fueled by bountiful harvests of export commodities like soybeans and corn, exists only in pockets. In parts of Asunción, showrooms are selling out of Porsches and Audis, and cranes are putting the finishing touches on luxury towers like the Ícono, a 37-story skyscraper of SoHo-inspired lofts.

Yet much of the country, which has long figured among South America’s poorest and most unequal nations, remains left behind. More than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the central bank, and Paraguay ranks near the bottom among South American countries in reducing poverty over the last decade, according to the United Nations.

Social spending for antipoverty projects is minimal, largely because taxation is lacking. Paraguay did not even have an income tax until this year, but even though the new across-the-board rate is low, at 10 percent, few people are expected to pay it, as exemptions and loopholes abound. The result: the economic boom may be accentuating the festering inequality in one of Latin America’s most politically unstable nations.

“Nearly all of the growth is driven by highly mechanized agriculture, which generates few jobs for the population,” said Andrew Dickson, an expert on Paraguay’s development policies at the University of Birmingham in Britain. “With a government that finances itself largely through value-added taxes and taxes on imports, you have a situation rather like a low-income African country.”

Paraguay is a landlocked nation about the size of California, sandwiched between southern Brazil and northern Argentina, with a population of 6.5 million. About 77 percent of its arable land is controlled by 1 percent of the nation’s landowners, according to the last agricultural census, and land disputes simmer in various parts of the country.

Activists claim that for decades large tracts of land were illegally distributed by corrupt officials, leaving many land titles in question. In one particularly bloody clash last June, 11 peasants and six police officers were killed at a soy estate in Curuguaty, in eastern Paraguay.

Legislators seized on that episode as a way to oust Fernando Lugo, the former Roman Catholic bishop who was elected president in 2008, ending six decades of one-party rule. Mr. Lugo had initially been expected to focus on reducing inequality, but faced obstacles in doing so.

Paraguay’s new president is one of the nation’s wealthiest men, the tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes, who was elected Sunday after promoting conservative, business-friendly policies during his campaign. He recognized poverty as an issue but has been vague about any plans for reducing it beyond trying to create more jobs through private investment.

The government’s economists remain bullish about growth, arguing that Paraguay, devastated by a 19th-century war that wiped out most of its male population and ruled throughout much of the 20th century by Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, is emerging from decades of ostracism in the global economy.

Paraguay sold $500 million of bonds in January in international markets, a rare source of financing for a nation overlooked by many foreign bankers for decades. Inflation and unemployment remain low, at less than 2 percent and less than 6 percent, respectively, and the overall poverty rate has fallen to about 32 percent in 2011 from 44 percent in 2003, said Roland Horst, a board member at the central bank.

“We do have a peasant issue now and then,” Mr. Horst said in an interview. “But there is less tension than 10 years ago.” He said the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families. Other economists, however, dispute such sunny assessments, arguing that the economy remains subject to wide swings, surging this year thanks in part to favorable weather conditions for certain crops, after contracting slightly in 2012 when farmers struggled with a drought.

They also contend that Paraguay’s social welfare programs remain meager compared with antipoverty projects in neighboring countries, which have lifted tens of millions of people out of abject living conditions. They blame Paraguay’s relatively weak state, with tax collection corresponding to only about 18 percent of gross domestic product, a figure lower than that of African nations like Congo and Chad.

“The statistics showing historically low unemployment are a farce,” said Luis Rojas Villagra, an economist at the National University, who estimates that as much as half of Paraguay’s work force is unemployed or underemployed in jobs with degrading wages and working conditions.

“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that hundreds of people survive each day by sifting through garbage in the municipal dump of Asunción while Paraguayans are also the biggest per-capita spenders in Punta del Este?” said Mr. Rojas Villagra, referring to the Uruguayan resort city where rich Paraguayans vacation alongside moneyed Argentines and Brazilians.

Such contrasts persist across Paraguay’s economy. Pockets of luxury, for instance, are expanding near Ciudad del Este, the city on the Brazilian border renowned as a smuggler’s haven.

One development, the Paraná Country Club, includes mansions selling for more than $3 million, largely to soybean growers or business executives from Brazil who have opened factories in Paraguay, a migration of manufacturing that is starting to resemble that of companies from the United States opening factories in low-wage Mexican border cities.

“2013 is starting to look like an amazing year,” said Thelma Amaral, an architect who designs homes near Ciudad del Este.

But elsewhere, including the soybean regions at the root of the growth, examples abound of disparities and disputes, largely over land. A small leftist rebel group, the Paraguayan People’s Army, has been picking off security forces in remote areas. Last weekend, the group killed at least one police officer and wounded several others.

In December, gunmen shot dead Vidal Vega, a leader of the peasant movement involved in the deadly clash at Curuguaty. He had been expected to be a witness at the criminal trial intended to shed light on the massacre. The inquiry into his killing, as in similar cases of peasant leaders killed in Paraguay in recent years, has turned up few leads.

Digital Daredevil Behind Megaupload Has a New Venture

AUCKLAND — At 6:48 a.m. Sunday, the Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom opened his new file-storage Web site to the public — one year to the minute after the police raided the mansion he rents in New Zealand.

The raid was part of a coordinated operation with the F.B.I. that also shut down Megaupload, the file-sharing business he had founded.

Mr. Dotcom faces charges in the United States of pirating copyrighted material and money laundering and is awaiting an extradition hearing in New Zealand. But on Sunday, his focus was on the new site, which was already straining under heavy traffic within two hours of its introduction. In the first 14 hours of the site’s operation, more than half a million people registered to use it, Mr. Dotcom said.

“This should not be seen as the mocking of any government or Hollywood,” Mr. Dotcom, 39, said Sunday at a news conference at the Auckland mansion. “This is us being innovators and executing our right to run a business.”

The event marking the introduction of Mega, held at the same property that had been raided by the police, was designed to be a spectacle. As Mr. Dotcom addressed a large crowd of journalists and guests, actors dressed as armed police officers rappelled down the sloping roof of the main house and shouted that all those present would be detained. A helicopter emblazoned with “F.B.I.” hovered overhead.

Mr. Dotcom, a German citizen and permanent resident of New Zealand who was born Kim Schmitz, was arrested Jan. 20, 2012. During the raid on his home that day, the police seized vehicles worth about 6 million New Zealand dollars, or $5 million, and froze about 11 million dollars in bank accounts, according to a news release issued at the time.

Over the past year, Mr. Dotcom has become an ever-prominent figure in New Zealand as the legal and political saga surrounding his case has played out in the public sphere.

In June, a High Court judge ruled that the police had used the wrong type of search warrants to enter Mr. Dotcom’s property, meaning that the raid had been illegal. In September, Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand apologized to Mr. Dotcom after it was disclosed that the country’s intelligence agency had acted illegally by spying on him, even though he holds a permanent resident’s visa.

Mega, Mr. Dotcom’s new Web site, is a file-storage and sharing system that encrypts files on one’s computer before they are uploaded to the site’s servers. Files can then be downloaded and decrypted. This means that files on Mega’s servers cannot be read by anyone, including by the company itself, without the user’s decryption key.

The allegation that Mr. Dotcom’s previous venture, Megaupload, knew its users were illegally uploading copyrighted material — and indeed sought to encourage the practice — is a crucial part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment against the site and those who operated it.

In contrast, the new site appears to distance Mega intentionally from any legal responsibility for the content on its servers, although the terms and conditions of the site do explicitly forbid uploading copyrighted material.

“What he’s trying to do is give himself a second-string argument,” Charles Alexander, a lawyer in Sydney who specializes in intellectual property law, told The Associated Press. “‘Even if I was wrong before, this one’s all right because how can I control something if I don’t know that it’s there?”’ he imagined the new company thinking. “I can understand the argument; whether it would be successful or not is another matter.”

U.S. prosecutors declined to comment on the new site, The A.P. reported, referring only to a court document that cites promises Mr. Dotcom made while seeking bail, including one that he would not start a Megaupload-style business until the criminal case was resolved.

“Legally it’s probably the most scrutinized Internet start-up in history,” Mr. Dotcom said. “Every pixel on the site has been checked for, you know, all kinds of illegal — potential legal challenges. We have a great team of very talented lawyers that are experts in intellectual property and Internet law, and they have worked together with us to create Mega.”

The Motion Picture Association of America, which has filed complaints about alleged copyright infringement by Megaupload, told The A.P. that it was skeptical that Mr. Dotcom’s new site was harmless. “We are still reviewing how this new project will operate, but we do know that Kim Dotcom has built his career and his fortune on stealing creative works,” it said in a news release.

The Mega site offers 50 gigabytes of storage free; additional storage and bandwidth can be purchased at three tiers of monthly fees.

Google’s Lawyers Work Behind the Scenes to Carry the Day

After regulators had pored over nine million documents, listened to complaints from disgruntled competitors and took sworn testimony from Google executives, the government concluded that the law was on Google’s side. At the end of the day, they said, consumers had been largely unharmed.

That is why one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American company in years ended with a slap on the wrist Thursday, when the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation of Google’s search practices without bringing a complaint. Google voluntarily made two minor concessions.

“The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.”

The F.T.C. had put serious effort into its investigation of Google. Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, has long advocated for the commission to flex its muscle as an enforcer of antitrust laws, and the commission had hired high-powered consultants, including Beth A. Wilkinson, an experienced litigator, and Richard J. Gilbert, a well-known economist.

Still, Mr. Leibowitz said during a news conference announcing the result of the inquiry, the evidence showed that Google “doesn’t violate American antitrust laws.”

“The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a company blog post.

The main thrust of the investigation was into how Google’s search results had changed since it expanded into new search verticals, like local business listings and comparison shopping. A search for pizza or jeans, for instance, now shows results with photos and maps from Google’s own local business service and its shopping product more prominently than links to other Web sites, which has enraged competing sites.

But while the F.T.C. said that Google’s actions might have hurt individual competitors, over all it found that the search engine helped consumers, as evidenced by Google users’ clicking on the products that Google highlighted and competing search engines’ adopting similar approaches.

Google outlined these kinds of arguments to regulators in many meetings over the last two years, as it has intensified its courtship of Washington, with Google executives at the highest levels, as well as lawyers, lobbyists and engineers appearing in the capital.

One of the arguments they made, according to people briefed on the discussions, was that technology is such a fast-moving industry that regulatory burdens would hinder its evolution. Google makes about 500 changes to its search algorithm each year, so results look different now than they did even six months ago.

The definition of competition in the tech industry is also different and constantly changing, Google argued.

For instance, just recently Amazon and Apple, which used to be in different businesses than Google, have become its competitors. Google’s share of the search market has stayed at about two-thirds even though competing search engines are “just a click away,” as the company repeatedly argued. That would become the company’s mantra to demonstrate that it was not abusing its market power.

Claire Cain Miller reported from San Francisco, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

Playlist | Psy: Interview: Psy, the Artist Behind ‘Gangnam Style’

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Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind

Quora is not the only social technology company that presents an antisocial attitude to callers. Twitter’s phone system hangs up after providing Web or e-mail addresses three times. At the end of a long phone tree, Facebook’s system explains it is, in fact, “an Internet-based company.” Try e-mail, it suggests.

LinkedIn’s voice mail lists an alternate customer service number. Dial it, and the caller is trapped in a telephonic version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” forced to work through the original phone tree again and again until the lesson is clear: stop calling.

Voice calls have been falling out of fashion with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text only, please). But what is a matter of preference for the young is becoming a matter of policy for technology companies; phones cost money, phones do not scale. Besides, why call when you can use Google, or send a Twitter message?

On the other end of the line, however, some people may not know how to Google, or do not want to use Twitter. These users may be older, or less technically adept, and they are finding the method of communication they have relied on for a lifetime shifting under their feet. It does not make sense, they say, that a company with products used by millions every day cannot pick up the phone.

The companies argue that with millions of users every day, they cannot possibly pick up a phone.

“A lot of these companies don’t have enough employees to talk to,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. Facebook, for example, has just one employee for every 300,000 users. Its online systems process more than two million customer requests a day.

Google, which at 14 years old is a relative ancient in Silicon Valley, is one of the few companies that publishes phone numbers on its Web site. Its phone system sends callers back to the Web no less than 11 times. Its lengthy messages contain basic Internet education in a tone that might be used with an aging relative, explaining, slowly and gently, “There’s nothing Google can do to remove information from Web sites.”

Google initially tried to handle requests by e-mail, but even that proved too cumbersome. The company now steers incoming questions to online forums.

“All these companies stay away from phone support,” said Mikkel Svane, the chief executive of Zendesk, whose products help companies manage incoming requests. “People get aggressive or aggravated; people are depressed or crying. It’s just hard talking to customers,” he said, adding that these companies have paved the way in large-scale customer service by keeping everything online.

Officials at Facebook, Google and Twitter (all reached first by e-mail) say their users prefer to go online, finding it more pleasant and efficient than wading through a phone tree. But what about other business matters? What if, say, a prospective investor wants to call?

“If people need to get ahold of us, they definitely have sources inside,” said Derek Stewart, the finance director of Foursquare, whose personal cellphone has been mistaken for the company’s main office line. In Foursquare’s offices in New York, phone calls are considered a distraction to the developers and are conducted away from the main work area, in British-style red phone booths, the company’s spokeswoman said, explaining that calls are not part of developer culture.

Still, others see a social cost to this change, a deepening of the digital divide.

“The phone users are getting left out,” said Mari Smith, a consultant who trains businesses in how best to use social media. She should know. Because her consulting company lists an 800 number, frustrated people call all the time, looking for help with their Facebook accounts. She eventually adjusted her phone message to callers to explain that she does not provide technical support for Facebook.

“I just got bombarded,” she said. “They’re just so desperate to reach a real human being.”

Ms. Smith said she believed that large Internet companies might someday return to phones to set themselves apart from competitors. “The ability to call up and get a real human being — the companies who can do that and go back to basics are really the ones that will be winning out and humanizing their brand,” she said.

But for now, some people still feel frozen out when they pick up the phone.

Gabriel McKean, for example, was eager to start using Twitter. His 5-year-old daughter has a rare and painful genetic condition that turns her body’s soft tissue to bone, and the McKeans, who live in Bellevue, Ohio, started a Twitter account for “Ali’s Army” to raise awareness of her disease.

But the account was suspended in a matter of hours — Mr. McKean’s repeated posts of the family’s Web site were quickly flagged by Twitter’s systems as spam.

Upset and confused, he searched Twitter.com for a phone number, but found nothing. He sent an e-mail, but received only automated replies filled with jargon that confused him further. Without other options, he had no choice but to wait for someone to reinstate his account over e-mail.

He hoped to “plead his case” to someone over the phone, but that never happened. Two days later his account was reinstated via e-mail. Given that Twitter handles nearly 400 million messages every day, that might be considered a victory for efficiency and scale, but it did nothing to remove the sting Mr. McKean felt when he could not connect with a real person.

“The plain and simple fact is that they’re too busy or too important to talk to us,” he said.