.

I've posted this comment to this post on the company blog. Let's see if it is ever approved.

Comments:

1. "Twitter has nothing to offer the users of Posterous" - or something like that. I think that the person who said this is picturing Twitter as it used to be - 160 character bursts of LOLSpeak against a bland background. Twitter is a lot more than that, now. One can embed photos and videos, and run feeds through one's account so that updates to one's blog are automatically tweeted, giving one's readers an easy way to follow one's content at a variety of locations, if one wishes to use one's account that way. Look up a company called "Twitterfeed", that puts out an app that lets one do that. There's another company that has an app that seems to do the job a little better, but I forget its name, at the moment.

So, no, it's not true that Twitter has nothing to offer the users of Posterous. It simply isn't a good replacement for Posterous. But then, Mybloglog wouldn't have been one, either. In some ways, I would say that Twitter is a step up from Mybloglog, and that this is the comparison to make. Picture Mybloglog, with a nicer look, without the issue of tag spam, with video embedding and the option to follow one's update notices with brief comments. This is what one needs to see, and wishes that Twitter would see - that these are not competing services, because they're not the same kind of service.

2. Twitter doesn't seem to see this. Posterous, like any other blogging service, lives only as long as users choose to post content to it. The staff, if it is at all competent, knows that a panic can be easily ended, really with just a word, and that if it is not ended, the flood of people to other, competing services could kill Posterous. Therefore, if we assume that the staff is not comprised of idiots, we must conclude that Twitter, at present, plans to shut down Posterous. Who would needlessly run the risk of destroying that which he intends to hold onto?

3. Posterous is not a minor host. It might be a lot smaller than some of the other major hosts, but with - what - a few million users - it's a major player, and aside from a few volunteer shills, bloggers are going to be really antagonized by the needless destruction of one of the major blogging hosts. Moving a homepage is relatively easy, if one assembles one's site on one's own computer, uses relative linking, and then uploads. One can recreate such a site in a new location in a manner of minutes, if one stores it on one's computer with a directory structure mirroring the one it will have when it is uploaded. Moving a blog, on the other hand - even a relatively small one - can easily turn into an all day task, as one cuts and pastes one post after another. Or one can use a "wizard", hope for the best, and more often than not, notice that one's content has not been transplanted intact, as those who relied on Multiply to save their Vox blogs found out, to their dismay, a few years ago.

In the long run, Twitter will be cutting it's own throat by doing this, or at least giving itself a really nasty abrasion. Eventually, the last members of gen Y are going to hit that age at which they'll be embarrassed to remember their own fashionably feigned illiteracy, and tweeting for its own sake will easily be seen for the passing fad that it was. Update notification is really going to be Twitter's core business in the long run, though the vanity of the execs will probably blind them to this truth for a while. If the blogging community is angry with Twitter when that time comes, Twitter is going to suffer, as it discovers that bloggers can be just as stubborn as corporate executives, and a lot more vindictive.

Pity. I've enjoyed using their services. I'll be sorry to see them go, in about 5-10 years, I'd guess. A long time in the life of the Internet, I suppose, but a rather short time in the life of a pension fund. Ahem.

4. Ignore the people who say "wait and see". The search engines respond poorly to sudden moves. I was one of the people who was uprooted when Yahoo 360 was killed, but unlike most of my fellow users, I was not serious harmed by this. What I did was create a mirror to my 360 blog, a few years before the final closing, when I found that the staff was being vague and evasive when asked about the future of that service. I linked the two mirrors, and then linked from each post on the old copy to its counterpart on the new copy. The spiders had time to find the links, the search engines had a chance to see that the new location was legitimately the new location and not just the work of a scraper, and the new location took the place of the old location in the search engine results, soon enough that I didn't really lose much traffic or pagerank.

The wait and see crowd, on the other hand, got clobbered. What they're really saying is "hey, why do anything about a looming problem until the last minute". How well should one expect that to work? But some people keep repeating that bit of folk idiocy as if it were wisdom, and probably will for many years to come, never managing to learn from their own mistakes.

5. Pleas to the Posterous staff to "not let Twitter shut us down" aren't going to do any good, because the sale is a done deed, and the members of our old staff are now employees, not owners. They're in no position to give orders to Twitter.

But there is an option, at this point, an option that will probably soon go away. If the user base raises Hell about this, now, Twitter's management can back off from the decision to shut down Posterous without losing face. Twitter can say "hey, it was all a misunderstanding, and you know how excitable and passionate bloggers can be about things like that, it just goes to show how much they loved and cared about our new subsidiary" - and the world (and their investors) will buy that. If, however, you wait until after the announcement is made, and then protest, you'll get nowhere, because when management can be seen backing down, management looks weak. Not a good thing if one's job centers around getting others to do one's bidding - a boss who isn't taken seriously is a boss who can't get his job done.

Which, again, shows just how foolish "wait and see" really is, in this kind of context.

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Simplicity itself. I have a blog on Blogger called "Monday Never Comes" that is, in part, about Centrist politics, written from the viewpoint of one of the economically excluded - a graduate educated mathematician / electrical engineer who, having worked his way through school working more than full time and earned a dean's list average anyway, discovered that all that the "land of opportunity" had to offer him was unrelenting job discrimination and long term unemployment, on graduation.

Sometimes I'll read a livejournal that relates to what I'm writing about on my Blogger journal, and I'll post there, and then comment on what I've read, here. This livejournal, then, becomes an interface between MNC and the livejournal community.

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