Gmail team already said that they are aware of the problem and they are working on it, way before his blog post. Some problems are not easy fix and no amount of blog posts by internet celebrities will speed up a solution significantly.
This problem was very easy to fix: move his account to another server. It took an amount of one blog post to trigger the solution. He got special attention.
Remember that facebook non-deleted picture discussed yesterday?
It's 404 now. I suspect (purely guessing) they specifically took that one picture down, but did not also "solve" the problem that left it there in the first place.
I quit a social network a few years ago, but they would not delete my account. So I logged in and changed my name to something like NameOfSocialNetworkRefusesToDeleteMyAccount. And vi-ola, the account disappeared in a day or so.
