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 ...??
Gone are the days of our lives, now its life in 156 characters or less...
You should RTFA.
I don't respond to AC's.
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!
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ever tried using Twitter's API? They make it about as easy to use/post content to and from Twitter as you can without allowing ridiculous volumes of queries to their servers. Perhaps you mean the instagram debacle? In that case it's Twitter choosing not to pull pics from instagram, nothing to do with whether you can do it on another platform. Twitter can do what they want on their own platform, but they certainly seem to be making it as easy as reasonably possible to integrate their data on a different platform.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
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.
I'm a Leninist, you insensitive clod!
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.
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
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?
I... I'll just move it all to the cloud! YEAH!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.