Zoto’s Free Accounts to be Deleted
Read this over at Mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/02/28/zoto/
Here’s an excerpt:
If you have a free account on Zoto AFTER 10am CST on Wednesday, your account information will be imported into Zoto 3.0, and flagged as a non-paid account. When we launch 3.0 sometime on Thursday, your account will be available for limited login, but you will be required to upgrade to a paid account to have immediate access to your photos….For those of you NOT wishing to upgrade to a paid account, your images from your 2.0 account will be available for download (or deletion at your discretion) after the 12th of March on a landing page when you login to 3.0. Those archives will contain ALL photos and meta data added to your account while it was on 2.0. Once you start the download, you will be given 24 hours to complete any other archive downloads you need. After that, your account and archive will be deleted from the Zoto system.
I signed up early with Zoto and have pictures hosted there, one of my photos was even featured by them. However, this is the first I’ve heard of the free account option going away. Unfortunately the Wednesday mentioned, is the one that has already passed and I can no longer get to my photos there. It’s too bad, I did like their options for blog posting, but not enough to pay for the feature. I have copies of the photos I had uploaded there so you’ll see more pics from my free Picasa / Google hosted site now.
Update on the Zoto situation from their devblog: http://www.zoto.com/dev-blog/?p=103
I’m glad to hear that I wasn’t the only one who’d not heard anything regarding the free accounts being “no more.” (and I had two accounts, one personal and one through work–both so small that I just never considered switching to paid, but still might have if I didn’t feel so *slapped* by the attitude in their blog posts & forums since logging on yesterday to find my free account GONE & doing a bit of an *eep*!!)
I was just feeling stupid wondering how I missed some notification that important (as I do NOT have copies of some pics that I uploaded during a hard drive crash & just hadn’t gotten around to backing up from zoto yet but certainly would have, had I known my free account would be let go soon!) on not one but TWO different email accounts…
I *loved* the zoto site. I may have considered switching to the paid service. I sent everyone who asked me what I thought was the best photo sharing/storage option to their site…
…unfortunately, the attitude & level of snarkiness towards the “bandwidth sucking freebie accounts” leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, that I most certainly know I won’t ever visit their site again.
Comment by a sad former zoto user — March 15, 2007 @ 5:54 am