Re: Should You Be Allowed To ReSell Your Backupify Account On eBay?
In response to a tweet posted by @Backupify:
Someone is reselling Backupify accounts on Ebay. Should we allow it to continue? http://bit.ly/afHpGj
That is an interesting conundrum. My answer is No. Before I get to the why, here are a few Pros I considered.
The positive side of allowing reselling
First: many non-techie people use eBay as a discovery device. Much like randomly moving through iTunes to find and buy new music, many of my family members and friends found online services through browsing on eBay.
Second: from experience with my non-techie friends and family who regularly use eBay, I expect many of them would say the same thing: if they found out about the service on eBay, and it interested them, they’d ask their techie friends about it. Meaning, they would get directed to the service’s website long before buying it on eBay.
And one aside: most experienced eBay users would completely dismiss this offer (as far as buying it on eBay anyhow) because the eBay user has a reputation of 0.
Those were the only positive points I could come up with.
Aside from the obvious negatives to allowing reselling,
the passionate NO! comes from my views as a Backupify customer. To see someone so blatantly abusing the generous offer that Backupify gave to its first set of customers, greatly disgusts me. I want to smack this person for their greed. To let it continue means Backupify devalues its own services. Also, knowing the [techie] friends I would refer to this service, if they saw this on eBay, it would lower their opinion of the company greatly. While eBay is a great discovery device for the non-technical crowd, right now I’m going to guess that their main customer base is tech-capable. You have to have some degree of understanding of the web to be using Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Gmail and others; you have to have enough personal data invested in them to motivate yourself to protect that data by backing it up.
In summary, the emphatic NO comes from my personal concern that it could cause future reputation damage to a company I am just beginning to enjoy.
Inspiring Youngling
While playing with Google Wave I came across a neat little extension called the Word Network Gadget. It’s a text-only mind mapping gadget. The author has also created 7 other gadgets for Wave, as of October 20th. Pretty impressive.
Created by antimatter15
Take a look at some of the other work antimatter15 has done. Truly inspiring work!
Creative Inspiration
Sometimes you can find inspiration right in your own back yard. Local singer/songwriter Atley Black was introduced to me via her song Sailor. Her lyrics and voice gave me goosebumps!
