Googleopoloy
Don't look now but I think I may have got things back to what passes for normality. What a pish 24 hours, I did have visions of deleting the whole thing and starting from scratch (In times of crisis, my first reaction: Overreact).
Technorati doesn't seem to be indexing though apart from a brief flurry of activity last night before Blogger decided it didn't want to play ball anymore. The code is a bit more legal now but there are still a number of validator failures to contend with. I'll let sleeping dogs lie for a bit on that front.
All this has made me start to query the power these free services hold over me. Take Google for instance; they own Blogger, they provide this blog with search services, advert revenue, they own Gmail which I use for archiving, Google Maps, Google Earth, Picasa and Hello for photo management, the Usenet archive (Google Groups, formerly Deja-News) etc.
All this is provided to me for free. Great you'd think and yes it is... when they work. But what happens when they don't work? Who do you turn to for support? Who do you rant and rave at to get things fixed? An email robot that's who. How can you really complain when all this is provided for free? But when it's broken it hurts, it hurts bad. How much resource should Google assign to solve the problems of a few users (paying nothing) when they have millions of other customers happily working away with no worries? Worrying thought, no?
The blogosphere is particularly dependent on free services and software from Blogger and Wordpress for publishing, Bloglines and Technorati for search, Del.ici.ous for bookmarks, Flickr for photos the list is endless. What would happen if they all disappeared, or the companies started to charge a fee for their use? Is this what Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft etc are planning? Build up huge numbers of users, make them dependent on their services and then sting them?
posted by Ricky Dee at
7:44 PM
1 Comments:
Blogs will always follow fads - always have and for me probably always will. Services like Flickr already are paid for (if you choose to) and I'm sure others will follow. Typepad is the paid for service from Movable Type - there are other hosted blog services out there that will set-up the blog and do day to day maintanence so you concentrate on writing not hacking.
For every service that moves to a paid model there will always be another free start-up. And for every successful paying product theres always a chance that Google, Yahoo or MS will buy it up.
By
Ian, at 3 August 2005 08:02
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