Tempting the ire of a digital community - TextAmerica about to delete stored memories

Alan and I like to promote the successes of companies as we move into the Connected Age. But in a radical transition as we are now, moving from the Networked Age to the Connected Age, there will be players who make mistakes. Some make fatal mistakes. Now TextAmerica seems to be on a collision course with disaster. The iceberg watchman of the Titanic has an alarming announcement...

TextAmerica, according to one of their press releases from last year, are "the leading provider of mobile blogs worldwide." They are based in San Diego USA and have hundreds of thousands of users and several free sites to store pictures and other content. So far so good. Alan and I would wish them all the best. Except that MobHappy reports that TextAmerica has just sent its users a warning that all of the stored content on the free sites will be deleted this autumn! This is an excerpts from the announcement by TextAmerica, as reported by MobHappy:

Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard

This is HORRIBLE. Even in an analogue world this is very bad. First inviting customers to join and deposit their memories onto this service with the promise to become the depository for those digital memories, then to even CONTEMPLATE deleting them. Why could they not archive these for their customers? Storage is not that expensive today?

But in a Connected Age this is very close to playing Russian Roulette. The word will spread all over the web. The customers will be furious. They will revolt. If I was a customer considering one of TextAmerica's new paid services, upon hearing about this lack of respect for the existing community, I would immediately leave. There are plenty of better suppliers out there.

So first, thank you Russell Buckley for catching this story and blogging about it. I urge all who are interested in good practises in social networking to repeat and report this story (and please do link to Russell's story at this link:  TextAmerica - Responsible Curators of Digital Memories?

Secondly, SHAME ON YOU TextAmerica !!!  How dare you! Learn NOW and fix this problem before you feel the wrath of the blogosphere. Google about Kryptonite. Then consider the viability of your business as a reputable mobile blogging site!  You should know better.

Thirdly, I usually don't ask for this from our readers, but I do now. If you are a blogger (or journalist or have a website or participate in a discussion group, etc) - please review the story and consider what is your personal view. If you think what TextAmerica is doing is wrong, then I hope you also see this would damage us all as the reputation of a "major player" being this inconsiderate, cruel even. Some of those people don't have PCs, their ONLY storage of their precious pictures is that free space on TextAmerica. So I urge all of our readers to also report this story, blog about it, write about it, give your comment. Also please go join visit Russell's site and post your comment in support.

We do have power in the blogosphere. I am a professional in the IT/telecoms/media space. I can afford my own storage. But many of those customers of TextAmerica are not that fortunate. Its time for us to go help them. What TextAmerica is now trying to do is wrong.

Tomi Ahonen

Comments

[alfie]

Hi Tomi,

interesting fact? The reason I set-up moblogUK with a friend was because I once way back in 2004 had a TA account, and then, for some reason I've never been able to fathom, they DELETED my account! I was so livid I approached a friend to come and set-up a better, free, creative commons licensed, *responsible* moblogging site - www.moblog.co.uk

Another defecting TA user, Defeated, wrote a nifty application which basically grabs all your entries at TA, and then re-publishes them instantly to your new moblogUK account - the software is of course free and way easy to use, and is available here:

http://www.firepile.com/software/
for anyone who would like to move to moblogUK for free moblog hosting that will *never* be deleted.