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Did Flickr Just Kill Itself?

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Am I missing something? When I originally signed up for Flickr it was unlimited photos with only a limitation on the amount I could upload per month. Today I get a message saying I’ve just uploaded 200 photos and that I’ll have to pay for a pro account in order to see any but my most recent 200 photos. Is this not news? Did this change of TOS just happen recently? I realize that 24.95 is not a lot to pay per year, but it isn’t a lot to pay for Facebook or Twitter either, but what would happen to those services if they decided that you can only look at your most recent 200 items unless you paid. They’d be gone. Why am I not hearing more written about this on the internets? Flickr is the only piece of Web 2.0 credibility that Flickr has, and I think they’ve just killed it. Why not just move to Picasaweb or Photobucket? ¬†The photos that I’ve uploaded there came from my phone directly sent by MMS. Are the ones beyond the 200 mark that I can’t look at now being held hostage unless I pay the 24.95 ransom. This ¬†is bad karma all the way around. They at least should have grandfathered in existing users who signed up like I under a different understanding.

But the money is missing the point. The money is in exposure and search. Why for heaven’s sake are there no ads on Flickr? That’s their revenue model. Thoughts? Am I missing something? Am I wrong?
 

 


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5 responses to “Did Flickr Just Kill Itself?”

  1. Stephen Pickering Avatar
    Stephen Pickering

    Hey Kathleen you are right. I went back to Feb 27 and it showed now signs of stopping (I didn’t feel like hitting the “more” button anymore) Thanks for your insight. Gordon, did you catch that? It doesn’t seem like you are right from Kathleen and my initial tests here.

  2. Stephen Pickering Avatar
    Stephen Pickering

    Thanks Kathleen, I’ll check mine now.

  3. Kathleen Buckley Avatar

    Just testing the availablility of twitter updates. Mine seem to be intact on the twitter site going back…I stopped at March 31st.

  4. Stephen Pickering Avatar
    Stephen Pickering

    Crap I didn’t know that! That is horrendous. I thought all this time all my tweets were available. Thanks for letting me know that, although I’m sad to know it. GMail can keep a lifetime of my emails, but twitter can’t keep a lifetime of my tweets? That is ridiculous in this day and age of every and ever cheaper storage, as a matter of fact storage is ascending faster than Moore’s law.

  5. Gordon Avatar

    Twitter are doing a similar thing with your tweets, if you don’t have them stored in some external service and no-one favorited them then you cannot currently access them. For example, at the time of posting your last accessible tweet is 6:34 AM Apr 10th 2009 http://bit.ly/Uo8t8 but if you look at this in a few days time, it will no longer be visible.

    At least Flickr offer a paid upgrade path to let you access your content.

    The biggest problem here is the expectations set during the years when the state of the economy permitted the Freemium business model to proliferate. As soon as the economic situation tightened and capital was no longer easily available, many services found they were no longer viable and had to slash costs fast.

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