Blogging Platform Posterous To Shut Down April 30 94
New submitter Mike Allton writes with the announcement from Posterous that the blogging platform will close at the end of April, after being acquired last year by Twitter. "It's been suggested that people should use platforms like Posterous or Google+ for their blog, and I think this is a perfect example of why that's a bad idea. When you use someone else's platform, you don't own your content and you don't have control over the platform. Do you have a Posterous account? What will you do with all your posts and content?"
this sucks (Score:2, Funny)
im going to have to post all my spun SEO spam articles on some other free blogging platform now ...
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Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevere heard of them.
Guess nothing of value will be lost.
Frying pans and fires (Score:3)
I... I'll just move it all to the cloud! YEAH!
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Reason #1: A single person could replicate Posterous and have up and running in a few weeks.
Twitter proved they are morons when they actually used mysql for their message queue(then blamed Rails) and haven't really done anything to disprove that they are amateurs from top to bottom. Moving the back end to Scala is just a matter of a broken clock being right twice a day.
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Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
They were a new, easy-to-use blogging platform that came out around the same time as Tumblr -- another new, easy-to-use blogging platform. You know how it often happens that two similar things come out around the same time and one takes off and one doesn't? That.
One of their key features was that you could post from email, which a) made blogging accessible to a lot of people because "hey, posting is as easy as emailing!", and b) it worked (and worked well) from early smartphones before Apps took over the world. And you didn't have to make an account with them at first -- your email was your account.
They had some good ideas, but that's just how these things go. For whatever reason, one company hits what others miss.
Besides, they were bought by Twitter last year, so it's not like the owners are hungry, crying, and alone as they shut down their service. Most people figured they'd close up shop a lot sooner once they got bought.
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It more frequently happens that two similar things come out around the same time, and neither takes off, especially when they have stupid names closely derived from other successful services to announce their "#me2 #web2.0" status .... oh, I see what you
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People read your journal here, though, so that's a difference.
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... corporate buyouts should be outlawed.
That would mean outlawing selling shares, which basically means outlawing corporations entirely. And, being a moron, you probably think that's a great idea.
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What are you talking about? There are already restrictions on who can and cannot buy and sell shares. Restrictions imposed for much the same reason the GP suggested corporate buyouts should be outlawed. The reason being the detrimental societal effects that outweigh the benefit of having a perfectly free market in share trading. So clearly the only alternative is not outlawing selling shares. I'm not saying I agree with the GP. I am however saying that you should probably avoid making fatuous arguments whil
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I'm a Leninist, you insensitive clod!
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If I would have mod points I would have modded your post.
When corporations/companies can buy others or make fusions... it only ends up to situation where big ones go and buy the smaller ones what does bring new ideas to market but never actually end up to deliver them to citizens becauses bigger one buy it off as they don't want that citizens would have alternative for their product.
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So nobody can buy out family businesses when the founder retires, so they have to close. And the railway systems and airlines would have to remain fragmented into the hundreds of companies that originally started them. And failing companies would have to go bust and everybody lose their jobs instead of the good bits being sold as going concerns. Ad no Venture Capitalist would fund a startup because they could not sell out when it succeeds, thus killing most of the tech industry.
It /sometimes/ ends in situat
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Capitalism was about companies to born and same companies to die when they can not anymore function or no one is buying their products/services.
Sorry but capitalism is brutal business and there is no time for emotions of family business dying because founded leaves it / dies.
And Venture Capitalist shoud be the ones what take the risk that the company whats stock they buy can never return anything back... Sorry but capitalism and stock market should be brutal business where no one comes to save you, especial
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But the original point was to ban the stock market, which enables takeovers. It is not sentimentality that wants to preserve family firms. Without company takeovers, everybody has to be fired, the machinery and premises converted to cash. Banning takeovers is the ultimate anti-capitalism: it bans cashing in your capital gains. It is feudalism: all companies must remain tiny and inefficient.
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The question we have to ask is whether we want to live in a state of constant brutality. If we wanted that, we could just have anarchy. It would be a lot cheaper.
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Actually I would rather see corporations have to give equal weight to supporting the people and environment in areas they operate with making profit.
That would stem the sociopath nature of corporations a great deal.
Corporations need a strong chain and a whip on their back in order for them to not destroy everything in their path.
What corporatism has brought us, besides millions of lemmings that worship them, is feudalism. Unless you are a high ranking executive in a corpor
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Tell that to google which is always buying companies
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I have. They don't listen.
Of course the idea is only for thinking. Ain't gonna happen, as they say. There's a wide range of effect of buyout. Some good, some bad.
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If your goal is to sell out to a bigger company you have already failed as a technologist even if you sell for billions. Try thinking of a company that started out with the plan to sell out at some point and also produced something of real and lasting value.
Well, you do get the content (Score:4, Interesting)
And there is PostHaven [techcrunch.com] now, launched by a co-founder of Posterous.
Did you *read* TFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article gives specific instructions how to save all your blog content. In some cases, move it to another host. But you must do it before they shutdown. So the problem is ...??
Re:Did you *read* TFA? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure of why Google+ is mentioned, especially as it's one of the few that will allow you to easily extract all your data. Regardless, everyone should know that you're at the mercy of the whims of those that provide 'free' services. You should always know what the real 'cost' is, and have an escape plan you can use if required.
Re:Did you *read* TFA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google+ was mentioned to gather clicks and cause discussion why Google+ is so terrible.
Hell... the most of the WWW is terrible since corporations conquered it and we moved away from simple and good looking HTML sites to huge advertising competition and who designs most fancy animated page.
Some days I think we would have been much better in times when email didn't have HTML coding possibilities and discussion happened in BBS/NNTP way instead HTML forums with huge banners, "billion of links" and signatures what people abuse etc. (we can always make things cleaner and good looking but HTML was way too easy slippery sloap what was offered to so called "designers" who could make any element of picture as link).
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Don't be so nitpicky, it was obviously intended to be "slippery soap".
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just don't bend over; that last link is a doosey.
Re:Did you *read* TFA? (Score:5, Funny)
> we moved away from simple and good looking HTML sites
<body background=blink.gif><br><br><br><br><img src=under_construction.gif><br><marquee><font color=red><blink><i>TOTALLY</i> agree</blink>. It was <b>much</b> better in GeoCities' times</font></marquee><br><img src=under_construction.gif><br><embed src=rickroll.mid autostart=true autoplay=true hidden=true/></body>
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I'm guessing the second issue of your newsletter will cover the scourge that is children running across your lawn?
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You should always know what the real 'cost' is, and have an escape plan you can use if required.
Yep. And I'm sure the 100s of thousands of bloggers who have no idea what a server or a host is let alone can setup wordpress or some platform on a private paid service have taken this into account.
Free + time taken to move blog elsewhere + minor loss of readship is likely less than
Hosting + expensive consultant fees to help setup blog.
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Their main business model depends on collecting as much data on everyone as they can. Everything from search, to map, to docs, to everything in between are nothing more than data mining applications.
People used to yell and scream about crap like gator and other tracking systems and Google is no different than those types of "services". Once Google bought the the spyware doubleclick, complaints about pretty much ceased.
Google is a more dangerous thr
One year ago (Score:1)
They wrote:
"Plus, the people at Twitter are genuinely nice folks who share our vision for making sharing simpler."
Except obviously sharing from any platform that is not Twitter.
Goodbye Posterous, whatever you were.
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Content (Score:2, Insightful)
While I haven't read the Posterous TOS i doubt they "own" people's content... however, the issue I think that Mike was trying to highlight is while you own your content you might not be able to migrate it and/or loss access to it..
Re:Content (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not clear how you would lose your data. You can download everything into a zip file. Then you can either parse the stuff yourself or use the import facility at Wordpress or Squarespace. It is probably good advice to make sure you have another copy of everything you depend on the cloud for, but this shutdown is not a good example of what can go wrong.
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> ... this shutdown is not a good example of what can go wrong.
In fact, this is basically a good example of how to do a shutdown right -- as opposed to, say, what Geocities did.
Back it up and import it somewhere else (Score:1)
Back it up and import it somewhere else like it says in the post...
oh the irony (Score:1)
What an ironic name. The real issue is that data can't easily be moved to another platform. At least with something like WordPress you can take your data and go solo indefinitely.
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Youre right, your post is ironic.
Shrinking Intelect (Score:4, Funny)
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As might be expected, words are shrinking along with intellect, which is spelled with two "l" characters. Additionally, the contraction for "it is" is "it's," not "its."
So now I am curious why ... (Score:2)
... Twitter bothered to buy Posterous in the first place. If it wasn't to have a blog space, was it to just get more accounts they can push Twitter accounts on? Seems a wasted investment to me. Oh wait, they just figured it out.
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It was a talent acquisition of sorts. Let's say you're a VC capitalist. You throw money at a startup. Business plan? Worry about that when they get big. But they don't get big and they don't have any revenue. So you cut your losses and save your face by asking one of your successful VC companies to acquire-hire them.
A warning to people exporting to WordPress (Score:5, Informative)
Friendica (Score:1)
Own your content - it's the only way to be sure.
Re:Friendica (Score:5, Insightful)
No, own your own WEBSITE. That's the only way to be sure. The downside isn't cost, you can get hosting for $15 per year. The downside is nobody will read it -- but they don't anyway.
Me, I just use slashdot. [slashdot.org] It's good enough for my purposes.
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As for your point about nobody reading it regardless of whether it's on facebook or "mylittleblog.net", spot on. I think there's p
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Why would you NOT run Friendica on your own site? One implies the other - any serious Friendica user, especially one bitten be the Posterous fail would do that. -1, Redundant
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No, own your own WEBSITE. That's the only way to be sure. The downside isn't cost, you can get hosting for $15 per year. The downside is nobody will read it -- but they don't anyway.
Me, I just use slashdot. [slashdot.org] It's good enough for my purposes.
Frankly, this is just moving the problem that the article poster was complaining about: instead of losing your blogging platform out from under your content, you could just as easily lose the web site hosting services out from under the blogging platform you run yourself on your hosted web site. So the next thing you should do is run your own web server to avoid the hosting dropping out from under your blogging platform that you run yourself on your hosted site, right? That ends with a reductio ad absurdu
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The difference between a hosted blog and a hosted server is you're paying for the server, even though the costs are miniscule. About the only way you can lose your site is a DMCA takedown, which can't happen if your host isn't in the US, or if the hosting company goes bankrupt. If that happens, you simply get another host, change the DNS values, and upload the site. Your visitors will only notice a few hours downtime, the site and URL remain the same. With a blog, a new host means a new URL and a different
still cost (Score:2)
Sorry the major downside IS cost.
Maybe not for the Slashdot readership where external hosts and Linux boxes with LAMP stacks are probably the norm, but we're not typical bloggers.
Typical bloggers a mindless teenagers who think someone else cares about what they think. Typical bloggers are aspiring journalists who want to demonstrate they have a history in writing. Typical blogs are written by anyone who has something to say and this does not require even the most basic of computer skills.
My sister falls int
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I ran several hobby sites around the turn of the century, they cost a whopping $15 per YEAR. IIRC they even had a blogging-like template you could use, although I used my own HTML and javascript.
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*YOU* ran. Not someone who has problems with basic computer problems, not someone who spends their time thinking those malware downloads are actual virus scanners, but YOU.
That's the point. I run wordpress on my site complete with templates. That costs me nothing. Now a childcare centre I worked for recently had their website modified to make it dynamically editable. Basically the guys installed wordpress within the site template. THAT job cost just over $3000.
wget it and forget it. err.. rehost it somewhere. (Score:5, Informative)
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That's trivial for you and me. But not for 99.999% of users of these services -- and I probably used too few nines, as most of kind would set up an own server, or perhaps even write our own code (just see what happened when Knuth was unhappy with typesetting software he used. Even if we're dumb peons in comparison, tendencies are the same). Parsing that html, ripping out the contents, figuring out how to import it into another platform... that's not something an average person can do.
Re: rehost it somewher (Score:1)
And then comes they fun of SEO - trying to pass over as much Rank value to the next site... Hoping to use 301, or rel=canonical. Hence why i dip my toes shallow in sites with unknown lifespans.
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If you're not using your own domain, take it as a free lesson in SEO: Use your own domain.
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Which brings us right back to why people are generally OK with not having to worry about hosting, DNS, and all the other stuff that goes into making a blog.
Broader Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
When you use someone else's platform, you don't own your content and you don't have control over the platform.
This is true. On the other hand, you are also shifting the maintenance burden to someone else. Keeping the software up to date w.r.t. features, bug fixes, or at least security fixes. Fighting spam. Keeping the platform that the software runs on (operating system, hardware) usable. Making sure backups are kept up to date and regularly tested.
It's a trade-off, and there are good reasons for wanting to be in control and good reasons for wanting others to do the work.
I think the real solution to the control issue, in many cases, is to make sure it is easy to get the data out and use it, and then regularly get a copy of the data you care about and store it somewhere. Exactly like making a backup, which you should be doing no matter who hosts the data, you or someone else. If you do this, you are protected against data loss and unwanted changes.
If you make sure you always have usable backups of your data, the only thing you still need to worry about is other people using that data. To some extent, that is something you need to worry about no matter who hosts the data, but, of course, the realistic threats are somewhat different for, say, hosting the data only on computers only you have an account on vs. hosting the data on a computer that is maintained by someone else. For me, personally, I have no issue having my website on someone else's computer, but I do have an issue with this for email.
What am I going to do? (Score:1)
Nothing, I didn't post anything worthwhile to start with on that service.
I was burned when Blogger stopped supporting publishing by FTP. I'll be running my own server from now on, thank you.
Oh the pun (Score:4, Funny)
Been There, Done That (Score:2)
Answer (Score:2)
Do you have a Posterous account?
No. In fact I'd never heard of it until now.
"Cloud" services don't last that long (Score:3)
Most free "cloud" services only seem to last a few years, until the vendor realizes they're not making money. Using a big-name vendor doesn't help - remember Google Wave, Apple MobileMe, Wal-Mart Music, Microsoft Windows Live, etc. The lives of these things are surprisingly short. About as long as a cool restaurant.
Don't get locked into a "cloud" service that stores your data in a form that can't be readily exported to somewhere else.
This is why I love Octopress (Score:3)
Can you ever trust services that are bought out? (Score:2)
Twitter recently bought Crashlytics [crashlytics.com], a company making pretty good crash reporting tool and service for iOS and Android. The usual "nothing will change" and made it free for everyone. How long will that last, a year? My guess is, just like Posterous they will absorb whatever they can of their tech into internal tools and then shut it down. Otherwise, why would they make it free? It's disappointing when innovative tech companies like Crashlytics get swallowed and digested like this.
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The crash reports -- like other services of its ilk -- are sent to and stored on Crashlytics' servers. The current TOS limit usage of reports by Crashlytics to providing the service to you and for service diagnostics. Of course, they change the TOS anytime they feel like it.
Why did Twitter buy this? (Score:1)
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Preposterous world! (Score:2)
... because saying post-posterous is itself preposterous.