When I saw the announcement last night about Flickr now offering one terabyte of storage for their free accounts, I wondered just what it was that they would offer for those of us with Pro accounts to continue paying. It turns out, they aren’t offering much. The existing Pro accounts stay the same, but appear to be going away come August, or at least that’s my reading of the announcement and the FAQ, but I may be wrong about that.). Then you’ll have the option to downgrade to a free account, or upgrade to an “Ad-Free” account, for $49.99 per year. The Ad-Free option only shows two extra features over the free accounts, no ads, and the availability of stats. That’s it. You don’t get more storage options or anything else, just the pleasure of not seeing ads and being able to see stats of your photo views.

That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, especially given the higher price when compared to the old Pro accounts, which gave you unlimited storage. (I’ve yet been able to determine whether the new free accounts have the same limits to the number of sets/collections that the old free accounts had, if anyone from Yahoo! wants to comment and let me know, I’d appreciate it!) The small advantages being given for No-Ads accounts make me wonder. There’s also a Doublr account, which offers you 2TB of storage for almost $500 per year, which is straight out of the question for an amateur like me. So are they trying to encourage Pro users to pay the extra, or to actually downgrade to see advertising again? It almost seems that way, doesn’t it?

Obviously, I don’t believe a service like Yahoo! is going to simply decide one day that they should really be offering more free services, and encourage paying customers to move to free accounts, just because. They have a reason, and I truly believe the reason for this is that they either make more money from advertising than they do from the Pro accounts, or they want to leverage Flickr user’s information across their entire network, and strengthen the targeted advertising they can sell, much in the way Google already does, and continues to push by forcing Plus on all of their users across all of their tools. More on that some other time.

Given where they hired their new CEO from, I would not be surprised that this is the strategy here. Yahoo! knows that Flickr Pro account holders have gotten used to not seeing ads, and using stats, so they are still offering it, but they are making it harder to justify continuing to pay for the ad-free account, by raising the price, and limiting the advantages. That tells me they want us to see ads, not to pay for the service. How that sort of marketing plan affects the idea of using web services going forward will remain to be seen, but it’s become clear that the real money is in information gathering and targeted advertising, not in offering a paid service. We can see this playing out on social networks already, it will be interesting to see how it evolves going forward.

Update 5/23/2013: Apparently the FAQ has been updated and the Pro accounts will remain the same so long as they are recurring payments. You won’t be able to get a new Pro account, but you can keep the one you already have.

I noticed something interesting yesterday. Like any other day, I had clicked over to an article, and after reading the article, I saw some of the comments being made about it. Mind you, the comments sections of many major news sites are generally the kind of place I would think about wondering into only when I felt like I had too much optimism about the human race and needed to quell that a bit. But something in there caught my eye, and made me wonder about something. I decided I needed to take a sample.

So I went back to the “headlines” area and looked for obvious political or cultural stories. The kind that usually attract the real trolls. Sure enough, they were there. There were posts spouting political positions of all kinds, personal attacks against other commenters, folks who felt no qualms about spouting hateful opinions about overweight people and on and on.

The only difference on this site, was that the articles being commented on were in the “influencers” section of LinkedIn, and all of the commenters were identified using their LinkedIn profile and the company they work for was listed right there, with their comments.

Talk about a way to really give your company a bad name. Talk about a way to run afoul of your company’s social media policies. Talk about an easy way to find yourself fired, or find your company being boycotted, or talk about a way for your company to face a PR nightmare. This isn’t some random website where you appear as some anonymous person and it would require a ton of work to track you down. This is freaking LinkedIn!

I avoid making just about any political or social comments here because a lot of people do know where I work, and it’s easy to find out if you don’t. Plus I really don’t think it’s possible to have intelligence conversations about either online, but I surely would never say anything close to controversial when my title and company are attached to it! Obviously, not everyone has really thought this through.

That’s the news from the Googlesphere, that Blogger users will now be able to bring in Google Plus conversations into the comments of their blogs.

On one hand, this makes sense, and might be quite useful for Blogger users who are also active on Google+. I hope they enjoy being able to extend their blog conversations into Plus and vice versa.

On the other hand, this just goes to show how much of Google is a completely closed system. Sure, you can bring in comments from Google owned Plus into Google owned Blogger. But what if you want to bring in comments to Blogger from Facebook, Twitter, etc.? What if, as a WordPress user, you want to bring in comments from Plus?

Look, this is a nice feature for Blogger users, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is also part of Google’s larger strategy to be your one stop “everything” shop, and to share data about you and your actions online across all of their products. Think about it, what better way for Google to target advertising to you (And let’s not forget that at the very base level, Google is an advertising company), than to know what blogs you comment on, and what you have to say, who you’re connected to, what kinds of things are in your email messages, who those are from, what you search for online, what events are coming up on your calendar, and on and on and on? They are creating a profile of you, using the combination of your activities on all of their products, and they are keeping you behind their walled garden when you use those products. Your own site, your Twitter handle, your Facebook or LinkedIn profile? Those don’t belong to Google, and Google can’t take the identity you’ve created on Google’s products to track you in those environments. In a nutshell, allowing interoperability isn’t really in Google’s interest, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.

While I think it’s cool that they are adding interoperability from Blogger and Plus, wake me when Google actually offers up a public API so the rest of the online world can interact with Plus. Until then, Plus remains just another site I have to login to in order to see what’s happening.

So, now that we’ve had a few days to sort of digest the news that Google Reader isn’t going to be around, you may be asking yourself what all the fuss is about. Those of you who’ve never used an RSS reader probably don’t understand what you’re missing by following a site on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or somewhere else, instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Truth is, when you rely on one of those other services, you probably aren’t seeing everything. Facebook is using some weird algorithm to determine what to show you in your newsfeed, and Twitter is only as good as the amount of time you have to keep up with it. Most of you who use Twitter and know this go with the assumption that the “good” stuff will bubble up to the surface when the other people you follow share it to their network and you’ll see it eventually.

Last week, I wrote about how that changes things from a bloggers perspective. I realize now just how significant a portion of the people who follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, etc. really don’t see what I write here unless others happens to start sharing it. Like I said yesterday, that changes the dynamic between myself, and you as a reader. I’m somewhat at the mercy of you and your willingness to share what I write. Oh sure, there will alsways be those of us who conitnue to use RSS readers and subscribe to feeds, but it’s not a growing number or people. We’ll move to some other tool and keep doing what we’ve always been doing. The “growth” is in people scanning Twitter, or using a tool like Flipboard, to simply try and locate the popular things that others are sharing. Those of us who simply like to write and share our thoughts and experiences are facing an even higher hill to climb to get folks to pay attention, because there simply aren’t enough people reading, let alone sharing, to help that larger mass of people find us.

As I said, this changes things. Do I need to go from blogging things I think are interesting, to writing posts designed to get shared more often? And what does that look like, exactly? I don’t know. At least not yet.

In the mean time, if you are interested in actually seeing everything I write here, grab the RSS feed and take a look at some RSS alternatives, or you can always go the old fashioned way, and subscribe to the email list.

Of course, if you aren’t following at all, you can also try the Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus pages as well.

Most of all, I want to say thank you for those of you who do subscribe, or follow in whatever way you currently do so, and for sharing the site among your own network. Obviously, when it comes to building up readership and community around this site, that goes a long, long way!

As I discussed last week, one of my challenges of using the Social Plugin to draw in comments and replies from Facebook and Twitter back to the original blog posts, is getting those comments imported to Disqus.

After a couple of failed attempts at this, I discovered one really good reason not to try and use something like a cron job to automate this. Turns out that if you use Askimet to blog spam; and since Disqus doesn’t really do much with trackbacks, you have to either disable trackbacks or leave Askimet running to block the spam trackbacks; this can create a problem. Any comments in your spam queue are part of your Disqus export, and cause an error on import. So in order to successfully export your new social comments from WordPress into Disqus, you have to empty the spam queue before running the export job.

It seems I have two options, manually clear the spam filter and then start the export function from within the Disqus plugin, or disable Askimet and disable trackbacks on all posts.

Come to think of it, do trackbacks really do much any more?

I have talked about this before, as have many other folks. Back in 2012 many folks were noticing the reach of posts on their Facebook pages had started to dramatically drop, right about the same time that Facebook was offering to promote your posts for a fee. It all seemed very crappy, and Facebook’s response wasn’t much help, as they pointed to a change in the algorithm and not a conspiracy to get you to pay to promote posts to people who had already liked your page, despite the fact that no one really knows what the algorithms are doing.

Now it turns out that maybe it was actually bad code, and not a conspiracy.

This proves two things to me. One, whenever there is fear of a conspiracy, the truth is usually just someone doing something stupid, not evil intentions.

The second, is that bugs can get you in a lot of trouble, especially bugs you don’t acknowledge, or know about. That lack of acknowledgment opens you up to criticism and questioning, when really, it’s just a programming mistake.

So we’ll see what the reach numbers look like once they get it fixed and actually track mobile users again.

So as I’ve been using Tumblr a bit as a fun little experiment, one of the things that struck me about the service is the lack of commenting. That seemed a bit odd to me. Sure I could always reblog a post and make my own little note about it, but sometimes I just wanted to make a comment, not create a new post on my blog.

Now I get that Tumblr is designed around the reblog, I’ve even had a couple of things reblogged, and reblogged a couple of things myself so it’s not completely foreign. It’s actually kind of a cool little feature, and super simple. But, I sort of missed just having comments.

Then today, I stumbled across a Tumblr blog that had comments. In fact, it had Disqus running, the same commenting plugin I use on WordPress. Sure enough, I went over to Disqus and registered the Tumblr blog over there, and getting comments using Disqus really couldn’t have been any easier.

So, strike down that first impression of Tumblr. I’m sure I’ll have more impressions as I continue along!

While I’m not necessarily convinced that this statistic would play out over a larger study, I also know that I’ve been recruited twice in the last couple of years, by people who I’ve met as either a direct, or indirect result of having a blog. So as I looked at the infographic below, I find a lot that could prove very useful for job seekers. What other advice would you give?

Courtesy of: Online Colleges

So Twitter released a video sharing service and quickly it has a porn problem.

I know, I know, who could have thought a service that allowed people to create anonymous accounts and share video would have this issue?

Ultimately, this is the problem with anonymous video, especially with the immediacy of Twitter. On Facebook, your videos are tied to your identity, and on YouTube users are more likely to simply search for videos and subscribe to folks they have already identified as trustworthy sources of good video. Twitter has always been a bit more uncontrolled than all of that. Video changes the game a bit. Now I have to really consider who I follow and what their videos are going to look like in my timeline. I can’t just start following back anyone who follows me. Given that, the growth of Vine, I think, is going to be quite different than that of Twitter, and if you use the service, you’re going to want to protect that account more than most users protect their Twitter accounts. It stands to be much more embarrassing when your account is taken over by spammers.

If you think about it, the Pope’s recent encouragement to believers to spread the Church’s message on Twitter and other social networking tools makes perfect sense. If you go back and ask the ever popular question about “What Would Jesus Do?”, I think it’s pretty clear that the same guy who reached out to the prostitutes, tax collectors, and other “undesirables” in his age, would have had no problem reaching out to the lost and lonely across Facebook and Twitter with His message in our current day.

While I get that many religious groups are loathe to be seen dealing with all of the undesirable and anonymous people out there on the “wild” internet, that is clearly not the example of the early church. What better platform to spread a message, and to be “real”. than to take part on social networks? It’s 2013, any group with a message should be sharing it on social media. What’s the other option, to wait for people to come to you? For a church, how reasonable is that? How many people out in US society even want to go to a church building? How many of them are on Twitter and Facebook sharing things they find interesting?

Yes, I realize that this post is about religion specifically, and I don’t normally talk religion online, but in this case, I think this is a great example in which we can learn a more universal lesson. People don’t necessarily go places to hear ideas and messages, they are much more likely to be exposed to ideas by their friends and contacts, and that exposure is taking place virtually more and more every day. It’s going to be in your best interest to get yourself, your ideas, and your message, in that space.