Flickr vs. Google Plus - what is the deal?

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Despite some small glitches occasionally, I have been satisfied with Flickr for storing my photographs online. I have used Flickr for storage, not much else. And the price suits me well.

I have bought a Flickr pro account for two years for less than 2 USD per month, that is hard to beat. For that I get unlimited uploads, storage and bandwidth which is the main thing for me. (Plus I'm ad-free.)

However, now Google is getting into the game with Google Plus - they have integrated Picasa Web Albums there. Some seem to love this.

But I have almost 20,000 photographs at Flickr, which means about 80 GB of storage needed. For 20 USD per year I would get 80 GB of storage from Google, and for 50 USD I would get 200 GB. So, currently Flickr is rather nice in pricing compared to Google, at least when you have lots of photographs.

But anyway, that is rather theoretical, as moving the photographs from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums would break all existing links to photographs here at Light Scrape. But if price is not a deal-maker are there some other advantages to using Google? Better integration with Blogger?

But anyway. I'm not really getting the point of Google Plus. Clearly Google wants to get a similar thing going as Facebook has right now. But are they able to something better? It doesn't seem so.

Of the social media platforms Twitter is the only that seems moderately useful, at least to some work-related stuff. Best of all, it has a more open attitude to third-party developers, and that is why it can be used for things that other platforms don't easily allow.

And then there is LinkedIn which is tolerable for work-related networking. But Facebook, it is a strange beast I can't grasp at all.

Why is Google targeting Facebook - or is there something really clever going on that I haven't noticed? Paul Lester posted some thoughts about Google Plus, which generated a nice discussion.

But still, I don't get it. I do have an Google Plus account, thanks to a colleague who sent me an invitation, but I just can't see the usefulness of it.

By the way, Paul also posted a nice farewell message to Cedric, who is closing his excellent blog. It wasn't often that he posted, but they were the more thoughtful and thought-provoking for it. Fare well!