Slashdot Mirror
Blogging Platform Posterous To Shut Down April 30
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?"
im going to have to post all my spun SEO spam articles on some other free blogging platform now ...
Nevere heard of them.
Guess nothing of value will be lost.
And there is PostHaven now, launched by a co-founder of Posterous.
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 ...??
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.
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..
http://www.hawknest.com/
Back it up and import it somewhere else like it says in the post...
Gone are the days of our lives, now its life in 156 characters or less...
... 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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You should RTFA.
I don't respond to AC's.
... 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.
The WordPress import uses an XML file for import of text, tags, etc. but reads the images from Posterous while parsing the xml. This means that people who delete their blogs before import, or presumably who wait until after the end of April so not get their images imported, The images are in the backup .zip file but if you wait too long you could have to re-add them all manually.
wget -r -l inf -k -E -p -nc http://www.yourposterousblog.com/
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Tell that to google which is always buying companies
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. It's good enough for my purposes.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Bryan
Twitter's pre-Posterous acquisitions.
Big +1 from me on that. People are getting more and more confused about whether Twitter, Google, Facebook or AOL are "the internet", they just don't realise it's all just websites (admittedly some websites running pretty funky background scripts) - at the end of the day all of these things are simply computers which take a request, process it and return some text and images.
As for your point about nobody reading it regardless of whether it's on facebook or "mylittleblog.net", spot on. I think there's probably a market for a website which allows you to blog things then gives you an ever increasing "x people like this" which starts at 6000. People aren't interested in other people reading and interacting with their thoughts, they're just interested in big numbers. Give the people what they want, you can even be honest and admit it's all a lie to start with - in fact, you could write an app which duplicates any Facebook page but multiplies all the numbers by 1,000 and it would probably be more popular than facebook until it was sued out of existence.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This happened with Vox. They had tools to let you move it to TypePad or WordPress. I split the difference (my Vox archive is on TypePad, new stuff on WordPress.com). That said, this, as well as the Instagram situation last December, calls out a common issue, especially with free services. How are things owned? What happens if they go away. Almost all of the pictures on my WordPress blog are hosted at Flickr. Fortunately, Flickr's TOS are somewhat better than what Instagram proposed from the ownership perspective. However, I'm screwed if they go away. I suppose I'd be better paying for hosting (and, to an extent, I do with Flickr), but I'm not sure I can fully justify it for a hobby-blog. For many, self-hosting isn't an option: they lack the skills and (even modest) equipment to do so. I could do it, but there are a million other things I'd rather do with my time. Fortunately, both WordPress and Flickr have good tools for pulling information out, so, for now, I'm going to roll with that.
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 situations as you describe, but a lot of takeovers are very valuable. You are looking at the small percentage that are destructive and ignoring the huge majority that allow industry to change shape in response to circumstances.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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 while calling people morons.
Ah, the little worker bees who are too lazy to start their own businesses, please - tell me more of your childish theories.
I'm a Leninist, you insensitive clod!
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
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Do you have a Posterous account?
No. In fact I'd never heard of it until now.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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.
Nowadays, I use Octopress, having gone through Blogger, hosted WordPress.com blog, self-hosted WordPress beforehand. Admittedly it's not for everyone, but it has massive advantages in terms of retaining control of your data over every other blogging platform I've tried. Because it just generates static HTML, you can host it pretty much anywhere you like (mine is on GitHub Pages). It's under version control, and you can easily store it on any machine with Git installed. With Octopress, this kind of thing will never be an issue because you can just push the files to somewhere else with ease.
If you're not using your own domain, take it as a free lesson in SEO: Use your own domain.
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, especially government should never come to save any private corporation or bank... Capitalism is brutal business... You born and you die eventually.
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.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Twitter recently bought Crashlytics, 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.
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. 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 absurdum of running your own ISP, then running your own Internet. Only then will your content be totally under your own control.
Mike Allton, the OP, styles himself as a "Social Media and Internet Marketing Consultant", and this story is more or less him stirring up some publicity for himself as a consultant (IMO), which is fine and good, he has a right to make a buck, but the death of this platform isn't really news.
The really useful only take-away I had from this thing was that the backups don't include hosted image contents if they are reimported on several of the half a dozen alternate hosting platforms (e.g. WordPress), making it important, if you use the minority platform that's going out of business, to not only do the backup, but to also do the import prior to April 30th.
Youre right, your post is ironic.
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.
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.
Just so they can shut it down?
Twitter being a worthless collections of extremely short, inane comments is not a competitor of a real publishing system. Trailers and Pabst are closer competitors to twitter than any "blog" site.
So should startups that plan an exit strategy before having a solid idea much less an implementation.
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.
+1 if I could good sir.
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 corporation you are their serf.
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 into category B. She has quite a big blog covering politics but has trouble finding the powerbutton on her computer. If she needed to setup a blog on her own space it would cost her a fortune in consulting fees and she'd still be at the whim of some third party to maintain her website.
There was a time people did this themselves. Thank god Geocities was shut down.
If you are going to point out fallacies try to avoid them. If your host dies, simply move your app somewhere else. If you are not a total idiot you can use http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/ for $12 a year. Since they don't perform backups, you will always have a local backup, right?
... because saying post-posterous is itself preposterous.
I... I'll just move it all to the cloud! YEAH!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 site design.
Free Martian Whores!