Corporate Gratitude
We hear a lot about corporate greed nowadays. You don't hear much, though, about corporate gratitude, and I for one am pleased to see some signs of it turning up around the Internet.

Most recently, Google's Gmail decided that the one gigabyte of space that they provided initially to get people's attention and to attract them to their beta version of their webmail program wasn't enough, so they doubled it and said they would be increasing it "to infinity." Now when I log onto Gmail, I see the counter, ticking away the additional space as it is added. Nice!

Last night I was surprised as a second instance of this phenomenon of corporate gratitude showed up in my inbox.

When I joined Flickr back in November of last year and started storing my photographs there, I decided to take advantage of their "deal" on becoming a pro user and paid around $50 for a year's membership at that level. It wasn't required, because you can use Flickr without paying anything, but being a pro user gave additional benefits and storage on the site so it seemed like the right thing to do. Last night I came home to find an email from them that said essentially "thank you" for supporting us early, and in gratitude for that, we're going to extend your membership from one year to two for the same price and we're going to allow you to upload twice as much (2 Gb versus 1 Gb) each month. Their email concluded, "Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today."

Corporate gratitude. I like that in a company. Let's hope it is the start of a trend that not only grows but spreads around the Internet and from there to other companies that do business in the brick and mortar world.
- posted by Perry @ 10:15 AM