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Lies, Damned Lies and Textamerica.com
April 25, 2004;
Beyond the hype: the truth revealed. Some people say that MMS failed and the new hope is mobile photo blogging - shortly speaking: moblogs. Really?

Is photo blogging really a savior of cellular mobile operators (dissapointed by low uptake of MMS)? Well, it may well be, but we would like to warn all users and operators about services offered by the market leader in photo blogging: the Textamerica.com .

What is mobile photo blogging? It works in this way that an individual user is taking a photo with his/her camera phone and then is sending such a photo to a special e-mail address - directly from his phone - for example on the beach in France. The exact e-mail address where to send as well as URL of the individual photo blog are determined after user creates (for free) an account at the photo blogging hosting company like Textamerica.com .

For example an address of photo blog may be like this mvp.textamerica.com and to post images to such photo blog the owner (or anybody else) must send e-mail with an image as attachment to a special e-mail address that has form like mvp.secretword@tamw.com .

It all sounds very interesting: you just send a photo as an email attachment from your camera phone and shortly after this, just within 2-4 minutes, the whole world can see this photo at URL of your photo blog!!!

Unfortunately the truth is different than this what most people think! Just imagine: you are going to holiday to south France, where you experience a lot of interesting and unique adventures. You keep sending photos and ask your friends to take a look! Everything is fine and you make even more photos. Then you come back from your holiday from France and find out that your photo blog account is closed and all your photos are lost and destroyed into non-existence!!!!

Shortly speaking: it has already happend several times that innocent people have got their photo blogs closed and deleted and the whole library of photos got lost!!! Usually camera phones don't have big memory so people don't make back-ups of their photos and instead are sending them to photo blogs. But we have just discovered that photo blogs have policy that allows them to remove any photo blog at will! In other words: your photo memories are not secure and may dissappear from photo blogging service any time!

The situation with "closing photo blogs unjustly" - despite not having any offending or rules violating content - happens quite often at Textamerica.com - the current leader in photo blogging. Interestingly Textamerica.com totally disregards any e-mails or requests to bring back (or to recover) the photos! They simply ignore all e-mails about photo blogs that have been closed. To provoke some reaction from Textamerica.com we posted related posts at newsgroups and only then we got such reaction:

the author of this thread either didn't attempt to contact us or didn't like or want to comply with our reply (if there actually was a thread between us at all). In this category, we delete only nudity or images that have been stolen from other sites. Also, it seems odd that there is no mention of a domain or account name in any of this.

... and then after specifying exactly the name of the blog account that was closed and after giving out specific email account, and after stating clearly that photos that were published there were innocent, we got such an answer from Textamerica.com:

Use of the Textamerica.com website shall be at the sole and absolute discretion of Liberation Management LLC. Textamerica.com expressly reserves the right to remove any images, including those which it believes in its sole and absolute discretion are inappropriate, offensive, damaging, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable. Textamerica.com reserves the right to cancel any person's registration and to remove any materials related to such member without notice or cause.

... or in other words: they have confirmed that photos that users post to Textamerica.com are not secure and can disappear at any time - without getting any warning, any e-mail and any chance to recover removed photos (no backup!). Please be warned of companies like Textamerica.com, companies that disregard customers and are deceiving you: your photo memories are too valueable to be trusted to Textamerica.com! Next time you will be photo blogging check conditions of the service that you use and in any case: make a private backup to your own PC...

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