Due to Flickr’s terms of services it’s not allowed to embed pictures hosted on Flickr on other websites without linking back to the corresponding Flickr photo page. People who are trying to keep traffic low on their own servers usually outsource images to services like photobucket. Unlike Flickr, photobucket basically allows embedding pictures on third party sites without immediately creating a backlink, but limits photo hosting up to a certain amount of storage and bandwith usage. Once users exceed their bandwith limit, a nice little photobucket message shows up instead of the original picture.
Well, that strategy doesn’t seem so bad at all. That way photobucket sneaks free ads into other popular portals like MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, etc. and even into some user profile pages of their main competitor Flickr.
Usually, when it comes to usability and interface design, Apple enjoys a quite good reputation. Especially the smart and simple iPod design is just brilliant, close to the legendary one-button-system.