Giving up control
I’ve recently discovered stormgrass.com after gibarian kindly informed me that he had added me to his blogroll. It’s a very nice weblog by a fellow viennese student and wordpresser, so if that’s your kinda thing, check stormgrass out.
A few days ago gibarian voiced a common concern i can heartily empathize with:
I for one don’t like to “outsource” my website’s content. Now, I know that many people don’t enjoy the comfort of their own paid webspace, so uploading pictures on another service is really not that bad. But if I used pictures I stored on flickr on my website, I’d always be concerned about what happened once that service breaks or simply vanishes.
Having switched from my own hacks to del.icio.us and flickr for linklog and photolog respectively i figured i might write a few words about my reasons for this and why i trust these services with my data.
Bluntly, it all boils down to convenience. I’m a very control-freakish person when it comes to my personal data and sometimes i could kick myself in the head for being how i am, but even the anal retentive reach a point where they have to give in to the lures and temptations of the better. del.icio.us and flickr are both several orders of magnitude better than anything i could come up with in the limited time i devote to blog-caring. Basically i gave up a wee bit of control but gained lots of time that i can invest in actual writing rather than code-fiddling.
del.icio.us is the brainchild of Joshua Schachter and according to its disclaimer currently in “pre-pre-alpha”. This being the nonprofit project of a single person puts a user in the somewhat hazardous situation that the service might fold anytime. On the other hand it has also grown an incredible userbase of 40k-something people and lots of linky-love and endorsements from the blogosphere. This kind of outreach and publicity is just too big to simply throw away. If you have a success like this on your hands, you don’t just drop it. The only real danger to del.icio.us i can see right now is funding, and from what i’ve seen in the past bloggers have some serious loose cash and are willing to burn it for a struggling nonprofit online venture if the need arises. I expect del.icio.us to stick around for the foreseeable future simply because there’s no immediate danger for it to close shop. And even if it should go away, leeching a full backup of your del.icio.us bookmarks is as simple as one api-call like http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all.
As for flickr, they have Cory Doctorow on their advisory board, one of the biggest, baddest copyfight/commons pundits out there. Any media company with Cory on board has about as much online-cred as possible.
I’m currently using a free account at flickr and there’s always the risk of having features cut on a free account. This happened to me in the past when yahoo mail suddenly dropped pop3-support on free accounts, which pissed me off no end. They still hold several hundreds of my e-mails hostage. But while i wasn’t willing to shell out the cash for a yahoo mail account, i can see myself paying for flickr if the need ever arises. Until then i’ll enjoy the free ride, right now their free offerings are good enough for me.
Sure, when flickr’s or del.icio.us’ servers go tits-up things will get a little messy in the sidebar. On the other hand, my photos will still be available if my own site burns to flaming pieces, as will my bookmarks.
Boy, this came out a lot more verbose than i had expected…