gigamatic

i just got email from flickr telling me that they'll be forcing "old skool" members to become yahooligans by mid march. yes, i know, i pay $25 per year for a "beta" service, and since they're owned by yahoo now, i should expect this. but you know what? i dont like yahoo. i dont like their search engine, i dont like their hub, i dont like their email, i dont like their chat, and i dont like their version of blogging.

so, that's got me thinking along the same lines as yesterday's post, but about using web tools and standardization. i found out a friend has a "vox" account (which seems to be the next big thing, looks a lot like yahoo 360, and makes me secretly want to hurl, like livejournal.). Yes, I realize it's sixapart, and they made movabletype. they also made typekey. and they merged/bought/whatever livejournal. which makes me hurl. google has its own googlepages, and who owns blogger now? google. this makes me grumble, too, but hey, blogger was pretty good back in the day. i could've sworn yahoo bought sixapart, (which would explain why vox looks like 360), but I can't find any evidence (and I'm not going to spend all morning.)

as these large companies (yahoo and google) battle for control of the interwebs, their toolsets get bigger and bigger, almost becoming software suites (i use google docs and spreadsheets already, love their email, and am tempted by picasaweb, since my family uses that already.) i love the control i have from movabletype and am hesitant to move to anything i don't control myself. i was hesitant with flickr, too, but ease of use and feature sets won me over, just like i moved from home-grown to blogger to greymatter to movabletype.

i guess i should find a comparison of flickr vs picasa(web) and go from there. i noticed jessie (over at contrasts.net) still publishes his galleries locally and a version to flickr, as well. not sure the benefit of that, though.

oh, and i'm ditching at least one domain name this month. i never used it because i never had time. the other gets used constantly, but i was thinking of doing an upgrade. i should see what my "users" (people whose blogs i host) think about a slight domain change and whether they'd like to migrate to wordpress.