Hootsuite – the social media client for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks - has gone freemium. Well, sort of. Despite the fact that I use Hootsuite every day, I decided not to upgrade, but downgrade my account – contrary to other heavy users of the service, such as Shéa Bennett of Twittercism.

And here is the reason why. What I love about Hootsuite is the basic concept – a web-based interface – and three features:

• Scheduled postings
• Simultaneous posting to more than one account
• Co-working on an account

I never used Ow.ly, as Bit.ly is superior. I am not interested in monitoring keywords or streams with Hootsuite, there are other tools available. And I do not need yet another analytics package. Most of what Hootsuite has added during recent months contributed to what I call feature obesity instead of keeping it lean and focussed.

And maybe more reliable; I still find the delay between a posting failure and the resulting message unacceptably long. And you always have to check e.g. your timeline to see whether the post really did not make.

But what I really do not appreciate is that Hootsuite’s interpretation of freemium does not mean “add a cool feature that solves a problem for which user are willing to pay for” but downgrade the original free account to charge for some of those formerly free features. So, it is not about 5.99 $ per month for a Pro account. It is about setting a signal that freemium does not work this way.