etribes: UK-based pay-to-blog service launches for 'busy adults'
This month sees the launch of the British blogging service etribes. It’s designed for busy adults without the time to maintain a traditional blog but want to share their thoughts and photos online.
It’s a pay service, which may seem like a bit of a risk in these days of free blogging services, but for £24 per year you get 10Gb of photo storage, unlimited space for blogging, and ad-free designs. The site can also be privately published and made available only to named contacts.
What do etribes say about their service?
Our aim at etribes is to help busy people to use the Internet more effectively in their daily lives. We do this by providing a really simple service that enables you to publish, store and share your news, photos and files online quickly and easily. Alongside this, we offer a set of useful features to help you connect with friends and family, including our desktop Address Book, with text from your PC and ClickDial.
We understand that time is precious – so you can use etribes either online, straight from your desktop (by downloading the etribes Deskbar) or even via your mobile phone. This means you can use etribes wherever you are in a matter of seconds.
So, this seems to open the way up for moblogging.
They seem to be pushing the storage and backup side to the service,
which certainly sounds more robust than the free services can offer.
Members can also send text messages from their PC at 5p a go, and use
the Clickdial feature to make cheaper-than-BT phone calls, and get an
etribes Deskbar with news, weather, maps and other reference material.
The desktop apps only work on Windows 2000/XP.
Founder of etribes, Simon Grice, believes that by 2008, 4.5 million
people in the UK will be blogging – and he’s hoping a significant
proportion will do so using his service.
What do you think? Will people pay to blog?
2 comments
Hi Simon,
Thanks for stopping by to comment.
Regarding the storage limits, that was a slip of the keyboard and I’ve just corrected it to Gigabytes. And I note the free trial gives 1000Mb.
I hope the phrase ‘blog’ hasn’t offended you – I think you’ve an interesting service that looks like it ties up well on the desktop as well. It will be interesting to see how many more people do enter personal online publishing, for whatever audience they are writing for.
Hi – I’m the Founder of etribes.
A few corrections:
1) We offer 10GB (10 GIGA BYTES – enough for about 20,000! digital photos) to our members.
The article quotes 10MB – this is not correct.
2) I don’t think 4.5million people will be ‘blogging’ but I do think they will be using a personal publishing servivce to store & publish their digital photos (in a secure way to specific groups of friends and family) and to post their personal news, events etc. for their friends and family.
We have thousands of people using etribes to ‘tell their tribe’ their personal news – everything from people getting married to people having a baby to people sharing photos of their hobby etc.
Most ‘normal’ people don’t want to blog (and don’t understand the concept) but do have specific needs to share personal news and photos with specific groups of friends and family.
Our members (30,000 customers and rising) get 20 text messages a month, the 10GB storage and unlimited use of all the features (including unlimited mobile photo posting) for their £2/month.
We offer all our customers a FREE 60 day trial to try all the services.
There are no adverts, no spam and we don’t sell or use our customers data in any way because we don’t need to. They pay us £2/month which covers the cost of their service.
Feel free to try it at http://www.etribes.com
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