Spin, Flickr, Spin
I got a note from “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com today telling me that since I’d signed up in the early days, they were extending my account an extra year and doubling my upload capacity. I thought, “Gee, that’s real friendly of them!”
I was curious what deal new members were getting these days, and it appears that the Flickr crew have nearly halved their annual fee (now $25) and doubled upload capacity to 2GB. So, really what happened was they decided to be competitive with smugmug and others, they’d need to lower the price and increase the bandwidth. But they didn’t want to piss off the folks who’d paid $42 for a one-year account. Sly of them to spin this as “giving us a special treat” instead of “we decided not to screw you for signing on early, so we’ll give you the same deal anyone else can get today.”
True, they’ve also given me two free Pro accounts to give away, though as an early adopter, I’m sure they’re hoping I’ll use it to get more connector-type people in the fold to hold the line against “smugmug”:http://smugmug.com, which offers high-quality prints and control over your page’s appearance.
Inertia will probably be too much to get me to switch to smugmug, but if I were doing it again, I’d be hard-pressed to choose Flickr. With smugmug, I wouldn’t even have to host my own web gallery site. smugmug + blogger or typepad could be pretty compelling.