Mobile & Web 2.0 Stability

With the rise of many sites in recent months what keeps people coming back varies from person to person. You can bet what will keep people away, unreliable services and ignoring customer's needs; essentially the same things that affect every other business.

Web 2.0 users are sometimes thought of as a fickle bunch, whether true or not the stability of new services is important. Nokia recently relaunched of twango as ovi Share at Mobile World Congress is a prime example of the stability or lack thereof. For several hours on Monday ovi Share was unavailable not to mention since the announcement images and videos have been taking longer to process. If it were only video I could understand, after all they are larger and take time to encode. Images on the other hand aren't nearly as large or complicated. Now take a look at other mobile services such as Jaiku or twitter. twitter is notorious for its downtime while Jaiku has had some issues with sluggish response times and its share of downtime, not to the extent of twitter. Users of both services will frequently hop back and forth, especially during outages.

All of this makes we worry about the longevity of such sites. In the case of ovi, more specifically ovi Share. I worry about Nokia's dedication of resources to makes ovi Share a success. Nokia is asking it's customers to depend on them not just for today but for the long term. ovi Share encourages users to not only post their content to share with other users but to embed that content in countless other places, such as this blog.

No doubt Nokia has the resources and money to take on the giants of media content sharing. My cheif concern about making ovi Share my replacement of such sites as flickr, which has a proven track record and most certainly the revenue generation, is what happens to my content in a year or two should Nokia decide they are not making the money or growing the customer base they hoped? Granted twango (ovi Share's previous name) has been here for a little while but it wouldn't surprise me if Nokia eventually called it quits from the content market and starts rededicating itself back to its core business, mobile devices. On the other hand Nokia wasn't always a mobile device manufacturer.

As you might have guessed I'm still torn about moving from a trusted and dependable service such as flickr, with whom I've entrusted over 2,000 images to the new kid on the block. I love Nokia devices and find them more dependable that other brands over the years. Will that trust carry over and what will it take for new services such as ovi Share to win your loyalty and devotion? Whatever the answer don't forget the Dot Com bubble of the not to distant past. There is much discussion about whether we're headed for another, will ovi and ovi Share be apart of that next burst? History of markets tell us such corrections are part of the cycle.

- Matthew "KrazyKritter" Stevens

Comments

[Al]

I really dont think its worth the time and trouble to move everything from flickr to twango.

I think I'll continue to use Ovi share though. I plan on posting my pictures to flickr and my screenshots to Ovi. My photoshop projects will probably get sent to both.

[Jukka]

Here is an alternative that allows you to share directly from the phone, for absolute control: http://mymobilesite.net

[Maciek]

My thoughts exactly. I already got bum-fu..ed once by Textamerica. They claim that everyone was advised about the switchover to paid service and that everyone had time to move the pictures to another service. Well... somehow I was not included in the notification and suddenly found myself screwed when my content became unaccessible unless I paid $90 for one year of service. NO THANKS. I don't want to end up the same way with ovi. Nokia should offer a paid service right from the start and a free one - just like flickr. I don't have a problem paying $30 per year if it will mean that my pictures will be there in 2-3-4 years.