What If Flickr Fails?
Regardless of whether or not you think the online advertising business is a bubble (which I do right now, but I’m a voice in the wilderness), we should face the fact that we are seriously exposed when we place our businesses and online lives in the hands of companies that make most of their money from advertising, and that aren’t diversifying into other businesses that aren’t based on guesswork.
[…]
Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to support in the first place, and the architecture is still there. We’ll have our own Flickrs and Zoomrs and Picassas, either on servers at home (ISP restrictions permitting) or in a server rack at the likes of RackSpace. But somebody needs to develop the software
The problem is that Flickr is not WordPress, where you can just move your data to a different provider.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
I've always been very hesitant to store any of my own things on servers I do not have full control. The problem is that people don't realize they're trapped until it's too late. There should be a law forbidding companies to restrict a user's access to his own data through its API.
