MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc.

For example, we built a custom MCP server for our CRM. Now our voice and chat agents that run on elevenlabs infrastructure can connect to our system with one endpoint, understand what actions it can take, and what information it needs to collect from the user to perform those actions.

I guess this could maybe be done with webhooks or an API spec with a well crafted prompt? Or if eleven labs provided an executable environment with tool calling? But at some point you're just reinventing a lot of the functionality you get for free from MCP, and all major LLMs seem to know how to use MCP already.

This reminds me so much of the "old" internet where people would just make fun things for the hell of it.

They call it "Site reputation abuse". https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.

IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?

Yes. The feedback loop shows the sender who marked the mail as spam.

> What is a user supposed to do in the case of an accidental bump of the "Spam" button? Is there really no way to undo the damage (both to the sender and to the willing recipient)?

There is no good solution, it kind of sucks for both the sender and the receiver. When you click that spam button, intentional or not, I can no longer send you email until going through a sometimes laborious process of working with the email service to get the email unblacklisted. If you really want to receive email again, send an email to the company/person and let them know you accidentally clicked the spam button so they can work it out with the email provider.

Gmail handles this the best IMO as it gives the user ~5 seconds to click "undo" before reporting the spam. As far as I can tell most other email clients are instantaneous.

If it was just my wife and I like it has been, I wouldn't mind the risk. We've gotten this far. My fear is in hiring a new employee and having their livelihood dependent on my business that has a single point of failure. Granted, it's a fairly entry level customer service position so it's not like someone's going to retire from the job, but I would still feel just awful if I had to let them go because we had no traffic due to something like a "mysterious" Google penalty that I can't figure out and will get no help from Google on.

I'm hoping we can use the free time we'll have from mundane tasks to think about how to make the business work with other traffic sources.

My business started as a hobby and has grown significantly (due to SEO ranking improvements) over the last couple years. We're now at a point where we (my wife and I) can no longer handle the volume that's coming in. Our options right now are a) hire an employee to help reduce the load or b) remain small and stagnant because Google could cut the cord any minute.

I'm trying like hell to find alternate traffic streams like Adwords, Facebook, Mobile, etc, but I can't quite figure out how to make a reasonable profit with them. So for now I guess I just have to take the risk. No guts, no glory.

I think when NASCAR says they are the biggest "spectator" sport they mean that their individual events attract more spectators to one spot than other sports, which for many tracks is absolutely true but misleading. Capacity at Daytona for example is around 150,000 seats which is far more than the highest capacity NFL stadium (Redskins at 82000). With that said, Indianapolis motor speedway has attracted almost 250,000 race fans for the Indy 500, but unfortunately not in recent years.

Anyway, what NASCAR doesn't talk about is that there is only one race going on at one track on any given sunday, and with a few exceptions the sport only comes around once a year. Compare that to the 14+ NFL games that take place in any given week during the regular season and there's really not much of a comparison. The NFL blows them out of the water.