I let my Flickr pro account expire on purpose to see how the change would affect me. After the expiration I realised just how much I am into the service – although I don’t use it that much to be honest. Flickr has put its cashpoint (a term I coined for this) into an excellent spot to start cashing in on the user experience.

You can upload 100 MB a month, have the last 200 photos visible and a total of 3 sets to categorise your photos. This is just enough to get hooked onto the service, but not quite enough to feel satisfied what you get to do with the service. I have over a 1000 photos in Flickr (as far as I can remember, since I now only see 200 of them) and when you have that many photos you need good ways to sort them out – hence the sets. Three sets gets you nowehere – you need more, yet another reason to pay the $24,95 a year for the premium account.

Furthermore, Flickr has an excellent API that third party developers have taken full use of. There are hundreds of different applications that you can use to play around with your photos. For example, I have an WordPress plugin that pulls my photos from the Flickr account to this blog. The plugin of course sorts out the photos and keeps them in a nifty order, just the way I want them.

I think I’ll have to dig in to my wallet and pay for another 2-year period of Flickr membership – it’s definitely worth it.

The lesson here?
Open up your services a bit, encourage developers to build applications into your platform and community and ultimately: give the users just enough so they get hooked (but there’s a lot more they get when they pay for the service). Another great example of opening up your service comes from Facebook – the all new F8, the Facebook platform. When Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old CEO of the company announced the platform – there was a lot of buzz created instantly.

No wonder, there are now 10 pages of applications available for the Facebook community. Also, small startups get extremely attractive market visibility for free. Facebook on the otherhand gets content and tools for their users to create more stickiness. Pretty much a win-win situation. iLike, a music network announced they instantly added 400 000 members to their databases, not bad a for a small startup. For the urgency of the matters, this letter gives some insight to the explosive growth.

Interesting times ahead for Facebook. Something that many web communities should take a note of, definitely.