seanbonner: TextAmerica Deathtoll Countdown

June 21, 2006

TextAmerica Deathtoll Countdown

Could the folks at TextAmerica be any dumber? Could they dig their own grave any faster? I don't think so.

Very early on Xeni pointed them out to me and I set up several moblogs there. They were the first people I'd see who had a good way to accept images I'd taken on my cameraphone and put them online instantly. They also seemed totally into us doing all kinds of cool things with their site. And they started claiming that they owned my photos after I'd posted them to their site, which is just unacceptable. Then they started running ads on my sites without telling me about it, or without offering me any of the cut. With my personal photos that was no big deal, but I had a few sites there like Raped At The Pump (about soaring gas prices) that were getting a lot of traffic and this seemed a bit off. Then they went a redesigned all of my sites. Rather than the custom designs I'd build myself, now everything was dumped into one of there generic templates. At that point I bailed, they seemed to have no interest in what their users were asking for or doing and just wantes the hype. And when my gas price moblog started getting a lot of press there was a little back and forth with them about who created it in the first place. By this point I was sick of it and agreed as long as they kept a note on the page that I'd created it they could do whatever they wanted with it. I tried out a few different options and finally settled withg flickr because it's everything I want it to be and the people there are cool about it. Anyway, now TextAmerica is breaking the #1 rule of the web, you can't charge for something that was originally free. They aren't being very clear about this, especially not to their long time customers (I have friends who I talked into joining when I signed up who never switched to another site and they haven't been informed of any of this) but it seems that they are starting to charge $99 a year for moblogs, and will be deleting any and all unpaid for accounts. Nice work over there TA, way to alienate everyone you hadn't already pissed off.

Posted by sean on June 21, 2006 10:31 AM | View blog reactions
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Comments

Textamerica was my first foray into posting shots from a cell phone as well. I used the utility mentioned on BoingBoing to grab all of my images and then decided to go in and delete them all before deleting the moblog.

I got this cool error when I went to the image library, selected the first 20 photos and tried to delete them:

Server Error in '/' Application.
Invalid object name 'mLogEntryImages'.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Invalid object name 'mLogEntryImages'.

Source Error:

Line 1326: If SQLstr.Length > 0 Then
Line 1327: Comm.CommandText = SQLstr
Line 1328: Comm.ExecuteNonQuery()
Line 1329: End If
Line 1330:

Source File: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\JadeCharles.com\MobWeb\admin\imagelib.aspx Line: 1328

Stack Trace:

[SqlException: Invalid object name 'mLogEntryImages'.]
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() +180
ASP.imagelib_aspx.DeleteAll(SqlConnection& ConnX) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\JadeCharles.com\MobWeb\admin\imagelib.aspx:1328
ASP.imagelib_aspx.__Render__control1(HtmlTextWriter __output, Control parameterContainer) in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\JadeCharles.com\MobWeb\admin\imagelib.aspx:45
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer) +27
System.Web.UI.Control.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) +7
System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +243
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +1926

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2300; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2300

Now, I can't get the image library to show anything. Sorry for breaking TextAmerica, I guess. Nice of them to give us all that information on the error page though. They might've wanted to set or <customErrors="On"> or <customErrors="RemoteOnly">in their ASP .NET web.config file to avoid giving out all of that information, but maybe not.

Posted by: ttrentham on June 21, 2006 11:23 AM

I made a little way to backup all your TextAmerica pictures: http://ta.nemik.net

Posted by: nemik on June 22, 2006 11:44 PM

Hi Sean,

interesting fact? The reason I set-up moblogUK with a friend was because I once way back in 2004 had a TA account, and then, for some reason I've never been able to fathom, they DELETED my account! I was so livid I approached a friend to come and set-up a better, free, creative commons licensed, *responsible* moblogging site - www.moblog.co.uk

Another defecting TA user, Defeated, wrote a nifty application which basically grabs all your entries at TA, and then re-publishes them instantly to your new moblogUK account - the software is of course free and way easy to use, and is available here:

http://www.firepile.com/software/
for anyone who would like to move to moblogUK for free moblog hosting that will *never* be deleted.

Posted by: alfie on June 23, 2006 12:51 AM