Posterous vs. Twitpic!

[charmian]

So, Posterous has been continuing with its import from 'dying platforms' campaign. Some of their choices were rather odd (a social network for Realtors?) and some of the platforms definitely not dying (Tumblr). Anyway, they set up an import from Twitpic, and then Twitpic blocked them.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/29/twitpic-posterous-lawyers/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/30/lawyers-are-expensive-we-can-be-friends-posterous-to-twitpic/

Posterous appears to be winning the PR battle anyway, though. Standing in the way of data portability is simply not a popular position.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Looks like they're aiming their barrels straight at LJ, too--but badly. Support for public posts only really aren't enough for most LJs, I think.

[charmian]

Yeah, it doesn't really work out. However, I think this is more of a PR effort than anything.

[foxfirefey]

You're right--I didn't read your last post deeply (work has been quite busy recently), but it's not just Ning and LJ that have less than ideal implementations. You can't import nonpublic posts from Vox (if it works at all, even), or get any actual dates for posts from Xanga. It seems like most of these importers are pretty half cocked. Other leads just seem strange to go after--Active Rain?

Is a PR blitz really effective if the main impression a potential convert could get is that you don't really understand their needs or know how to implement something that works well for them?

[charmian]

I actually don't think the Active Rain thing is that strange, but the Vox one simply seems misguided. Posterous seems to be trying to get business bloggers, and for Realtors, the ability to have easy, attractive galleries might prove quite useful (as well as the ability to use their own domain names for free).

I was going from the direction that this kind of thing gets covered in the technical press, and thus it's like free PR. Also, on LJ, there are some people who do have mostly public posts anyhow, so that might work out for them (probably less true with Vox, though).