Posterous: The walls come tumbling down
I'll soon be playing a game of "Will all my pictures vanish", seeing as they're hosted on Posterous and said service is throwing itself off a cliff come April. Unfortunately Posterous quickly went downhill after Twitter took over, with server outages, lost data, a blog interface that would frequently time out WHILE STILL TYPING then place the blog entry into a sort of dead zone should you be brave enough to still hit publish.
I reckon by a conservative estimate it'll take me the best part of the rest of my lifetime to reupload all the images should all the plugs be pulled, so hopefully Twitter / Posterous / whoever at least recognises that hundreds of thousands of blogs left pictureless is probably going to cause a bit of a grumpstorm.
Let's not dwell too much on the horrific UI redesigns with mystery meat icons all over the place (that began even before Twitter grabbed them - though they certainly never made any progress with regards fixing it), baffling navigation, being told I don't follow any blogs (while the blogs I follow would magically phase in and out of existence on my "I follow these blogs" list) and more besides - the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the service was going to be canned when it turned out the "sign up" page no longer resolved.
Rather than bother to just remove the sign up link, they left it to rot which is somewhat indicative of the service as a whole. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to do some basic housekeeping when the announcement was made and the front page still crowed "We've been acquired by Twitter" rather than "everything you know and love is going to perish" but whatever.
You guys couldn't stop messing with navigation that (for the most part) worked fine. You couldn't give me that most basic requirement of blogging services - a stable blog interface. You most definitely can't give me any incentive whatsoever to sign up for a new (paid!) service, when the one you're supposed to have been running has had all of the wheels fall off and explode over the last year or so.
Out of all the blogging services I've tried down the years, for better or worse the one I've always come back to is Blogger. God help us if they ever decide to shut down, I'll be blogging on bits of wood with neon marker pens.
I reckon by a conservative estimate it'll take me the best part of the rest of my lifetime to reupload all the images should all the plugs be pulled, so hopefully Twitter / Posterous / whoever at least recognises that hundreds of thousands of blogs left pictureless is probably going to cause a bit of a grumpstorm.
Let's not dwell too much on the horrific UI redesigns with mystery meat icons all over the place (that began even before Twitter grabbed them - though they certainly never made any progress with regards fixing it), baffling navigation, being told I don't follow any blogs (while the blogs I follow would magically phase in and out of existence on my "I follow these blogs" list) and more besides - the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the service was going to be canned when it turned out the "sign up" page no longer resolved.
Rather than bother to just remove the sign up link, they left it to rot which is somewhat indicative of the service as a whole. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to do some basic housekeeping when the announcement was made and the front page still crowed "We've been acquired by Twitter" rather than "everything you know and love is going to perish" but whatever.
You guys couldn't stop messing with navigation that (for the most part) worked fine. You couldn't give me that most basic requirement of blogging services - a stable blog interface. You most definitely can't give me any incentive whatsoever to sign up for a new (paid!) service, when the one you're supposed to have been running has had all of the wheels fall off and explode over the last year or so.
Out of all the blogging services I've tried down the years, for better or worse the one I've always come back to is Blogger. God help us if they ever decide to shut down, I'll be blogging on bits of wood with neon marker pens.
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