Fotolog Revolt.
Fotolog Revolt
At Many-to-many, Clay Shirkey reports on the revolt at Fotolog, who is cursed with its success and needs people to kick in some cash to cover hosting/bandwidth costs.<blockquote>One of the things that precipitates these kind of constitutional crises is manifest evidence that the users don't control the system. They know that, of course, intellectually, but when a community forms, they feel as if they do own it, and as long as the actual owners do nothing to disturb that illusion, things can hum along, but whenever anything happens unilaterally...</blockquote>
No question this is a bad thing, but the simple fact is that bandwidth and storage (especially of the large, centralized variety) costs money. Users can invest in community in time or money or resources, unfortunately Fotolog has no way to credit people for their time, and no way to use their distributed resources.
The right architecture is posting your stuff on your own desktop, hosted across symetrical broadband, and interconencted by Web Services apis (and doing some sort of content caching for other users to improve latency and small cross-continental pipes. But we're not there yet and won't be for some time.
[Corante: Amateur Hour]
Jonathan's right about the 'right' architecture. But that's just not how Fotolog was created. It was created at night, as a 'hobby', architected for 'time-to-market', not long term dpeloyment. That's a problem endemic throughout our world today.
Since there's no money anywhere - things are being 'thrown' together, not architected. Scoble's got another angle on it:
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Marc Canter covers the uproar over Photolog's new pricing structure. You know, I just have no sympathy for people who want their stuff for free. It costs money to do web sites. It costs money to design icons. (Really, when I was at Fawcette, even a low-cost graphic designer would charge $35 an hour, and the best ones went for $100 or more). It costs money to deliver bits over the Internet. It costs money to buy servers. It costs money for the software to host them (even Linux isn't free -- you gotta pay people to load them and maintain them). Software and systems aren't free. Anyone who is getting stuff on the Internet should realize that SOMEONE is paying for that. Either advertisers. A rich dude who is giving away stuff for free. Or a company with deep pockets who sees some strategic reason to do that (MSN anyone?)
I'm with Marc. If we want to see new services. New software. New ideas. We better be willing to pay for them. [Scobelizer]
I agree with Robert - but not entirely. In this situation, the avid Fotolog users in Brazil who are pissed off -can't use credit cards to pay for their gold premium version of Fotolog - even if they wanted to. There's some reason they CAN'T use credit cards over the net in Brazil, so they're plum out of luck.
I'm sure Scott and company are doing something to alleviate this hassle. |
I ran into the 
