tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

Free web services

Luis, I agree with you - we need to have free alternatives too. But the small, open web service lacks one important aspect - the other people you know and love. I think the reason most people are excited about Flickr, for example, is because it is of course easy to use, but also that it is so easy to share your own photos with it. You have an account, and most of your friends do too. All that is left is a matter of finding their usernames and checking the "friend" checkbox. Or like at Guadec, someone just added a group and came up with a tag, and people started tagging their photos with it - so it was possible to follow the feed from everyone.

Yes, we do need free services. But it would be very important that we get this social part right. The services need to network somehow, and also they need to somehow link to those big ones. It's about people communicating, after all things.

This is what we do with planet gnome, it networks our blogs, of which most are free software, using a common API and protocol (RSS). This way we can share our ideas together. Otherwise it won't work. We need a way to "planet" our galleries and files too. But the stuff needs to also link with the Big Company's service, because our non-geek friends use that for now.