During the last few months, two web-based services have been highly acclaimed and embraced by a lot of people:
flickr and del.icio.us
For those of you not familiar with these services, flickr allows people to upload pictures and “share” them with others. Del.icio.us allows people to collect bookmarks or just noteworthy links and share them as well. Both services are somewhat social services, as the promote interaction between users.
Now, I like the idea behind this, but apart from the fact that flickr is only free in a limited way, I also have other concerns. 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. My whole damn website would break! The same with del.icio.us…a lot of people put a daily digest of their links on their website. What if that service suddenly shuts down? What happens to the hundreds and thousands of links people have gathered and posted on their site?
Are there other people like me out there? Or am I the only person on the whole fucking planet who has enough time on his hands to think about stuff like that? Well, comment.