B. Mann Consulting

I remember way back (about 2 months ago), when development at Flickr was in full swing. They were going in all sorts of different directions, it seemed like, although picture sharing was still their strongest feature.

With some recent announcements, Flickr is totally focused on being the best way to share pictures on the Internet. Not only that, but they'll even hang on to them forever.

I can't tell you how excited I am about this. Somehow I think the news that Google is offering 1GB email accounts kicked something loose. People realized: storage is really, really, cheap. And now, they're doing stuff with it…

Flickr's offer looks pretty good:

• 500 pictures in your shoebox
• 1 GB upload limit per month
• Permanent archiving of everything you upload
• Storage of full resolution originals
• Complete access to your whole photostream in FlickrLive (coming soon)

And up until May 31, if you invite 5 friends, you'll get a free Pro account for three months. And apparently more features yet to come.

So, let's compare this with my picture storage today. I have a server here locally where I keep all the pictures for sharing. It's got essentially unlimited space, but I do have to back it up regularly (and we all know we forget to do this). Also, it's on a little cable Internet line, so if lots of people want to look at the pictures, or if the pictures are large, things slow down. Currently, we have about 7GB of pictures on there.

FlickrPro might just work for me. Please, when can I pay for it?

By the way, Stewart Butterfield is speaking about developing Flickr at the Vancouver User Experience Group May Session tomorrow night.

I'll be along to heckle.