Nathan’s gone overseas and Ashton Mills filled in for this week’s BRAN.

I used to spend hours gossiping with Ashton in his office when we used to work at APC. He’s very fond of having a face-off with a can of glitter hairspray. He also claims that his penis is so large that he has trees for pubes.

Thankfully, none of this is mentioned on this week’s ep of BRAN.

Still shirty with Flickr, I’ve had a go at 4 Flickr alternatives to see if it’s worth jumping ship. In my clearly uncomprehensive reivew, I’ve put together 5 points for each of the 4 I tried this afternoon.

23

•  You can only upload through the web site or by emailing  a spesh email address. Where’s the upload app?
• The price to upgrade is shown in your local currency. So simple, yet so cool
• AU$50/year
• Has ‘footnotes’ aka flickr’s notes
• Pretty flickr-ish, with groups and bits

Picasa Web

• Is a Google product. Yet to work out if that’s a bad thing or not
• 250MB free storage
• US$25/year for 6.25GB storage
• Upload sofware is that Picasa software
• Basic, but might be enough for most people

SmugMug

• Half priced registrations to flickr refugees. Score!
• Regular rate for standard registrationUS$40/year
• The logo uses the horrible Comic Sans font. Shudder.
• Templates on offer, even though a majority of them are crap
• I’ve spent 15 minutes trying to work out how to get aroun. Bad usability.

Zooomer

• Why can’t I just type zooomer.com and get the home page? Because I didn’t get a welcome email when I signed up, I actually had to google search the bloody thing to work out the url
• I had to sign up with and OpenID account or something. I have no idea what that is
• The web upload interface is okay. It doesn’t have a progress bar, though
• Lots of elements similar to flickr
• To upgrade, I clicked on the little ad on my profile page, which links to itself. Fantastic.

None of these places accept PayPal payments. flickr does.

*shrug*  looking around makes me almost willing to get a yahoo id and convert it for flickr. flickr’s got style, and while only a minor factor, the paypal option with flickr is enough to keep me with them. this girl gets some cash through paypal and is my preferred internet transaction process. or something.

I’m one of those who’s shitty about the whole you-need-a-yahoo-login-to-us-flickr thing. Yes, Yahoo! own flickr, blah blah blah. We knew this would happen eventually, blah blah blah.

Still sucks, though.

flickr is cool. and heatherchamp is cool because she’s offering flickr pro refunds out of “her own pocket”. but that doesn’t excuse the fact that Yahoo! sucks. It’s always been uncool and not even flickr could improve its cred.

SO! I’ve been looking for flickr alternatives and am looking at picasa, 23 and smugmug. I tried Picasa first because I have more gmail accounts than I know what to do with. It’s okay, but the picasa software still freaks me out a bit. 23 looked interesting after reading this review for flickr refugees. then i saw that smugmug is offering 50% off the subscription price to flickr refugees. i’ve signed up for their 2 week trial and am starting to get an idea about how it works.

In short, nothing is as awesome as flickr, but that won’t stop me from trying to get away.