Amused now....

Will probably switch photo hosting to flickr. Several people I know use it and have pointed me at it, and each time the lack of feeds has sent me away again because I find them terribly convenient.

They have them. They just don't mention them in their FAQ, where I'd expect at least a yes-or-no question about it. Apparently you're just supposed to notice them on pages that have photos on, but on pages that have photos on, I'm not looking for them; I'm looking at the photos. When I created an account and looked at my account settings, there was no sign that I saw of anything related ... because I hadn't uploaded a photo yet, apparently.

Nothing like having a feature and not documenting it in obvious places. Or maybe I just only look in inobvious places...like FAQs. Obviously I didn't look in the right place here. In any case, I sent them an email suggesting they add them and they replied back suggesting I look at the bottom right of "nearly every page". Of course, the first six pages I tried had nothing since it only appears when there are photos (and my photo page didn't have any). However, having been told it was there, I finally made my way to someone else's photo page and saw it; and I did then also manage to find it in the "getting the most out of" part of the help page (but not the FAQ).

I will probably switch. Impressed with them technically as they have the two elements I've wanted and a cleaner look. Not impressed with their communications skills, from the "it's obvious you idiot" vibes of the email (when in fact it turned out it wasn't entirely obvious, even though I can sometimes be oblivious) to the complete lack of a mention in their FAQ. Having a spiffy feature is even neater if it's listed where people might find it. (It's also not on the page comparing free to paid accounts - it's available to both, it looks like - where I also did check.)

It's now in their 'tour' of the site, so I'm thinking it may be newer, because the last time I looked (months back) I don't think it was. I must confess I didn't look this time.

Oh, well. I'll worry about it when I get home, but it seems likely.

Flickr....

So far, actually, pretty pleased with Flickr. Will play with it and use it for photos for a little while, if the favorable impression continues (and I suspect it will since I know others who like them and my main concern at this point would be service outages or screwups, which irritate most people), then I'll definitely be switching my main photo hosting there and getting a paid account. (When people do things the way you want, I figure you should support them. Buzznet wasn't, and really, no benefit for me. Ironically there is not a lot of benefit at Flickr for me in paying, unless I start taking many more photos, since everything else is good for free accounts as well. But it's right, if they're doing everything I wanted, and besides it would let me upload, well, tons. *grins*)

Update: I do not like their upload paradigm. It takes the title from the file name, and the timestamp from the file. You can edit them after but you can't set the time on upload in any of their tools I've yet used, and you can only set the title on upload from the web page (but, at least you can!). How ugly is that? And since they are editable later, you'd think it would be dirt simple to make it easy to edit them as you upload. Most of the tools (and even the web page as far as timestamps) seem to think it's more important to process multiples than to process a single one correctly. I completely disagree.