You need to add a c) data liberation and this is/was Posterous' long time problem, and tellingly so.
Would raganwald be writing his essay if he owned his data and could easily export it from Posterous?
Or would he have just exported his data and imported it into another blogging service?
People have been asking Posterous for a data export solution FOR YEARS, and Posterous NEVER supplied one.
There is backuperous, but that's some guy's project and doesn't save media.
I wanted to learn more, so I wrote my own data export tool in elisp -- it took me a couple of weeks to do so, with the main task being learning elisp and how the url package works, and now I feel confident I can get the data in several client's blogs back from Posterous and import it into another blogging service. But it will surely be a pain in the butt.
So while you are looking for a) and b), also look for c) companies that allow you to own your own data and export it and back it up.
On that scale, Posterous is/was always just absolutely terrible for their customers, and at the risk of alienating people here, I absolutely condemn Posterous and their behavior in this manner.
Posterous had years to supply a backup/export solution and consistently, and clearly intentionally, failed to do so. In contrast, I wrote my own backup solution in a very short time. There was no technical reason why Posterous could not supply a backup solution. And the resources required were minimal, almost trival. That they did no do so indicates this was part of a strategy of customer lock-in, and was a value-subtract to customers, not a value-add, and just abusive of the customer in general.
Here at HN, we love to laud the founders and act all clubby with them, but ya know, what Posterous did to its users by failing to provide a backup was just terrible and shame on Posterous' founders for using the user's data as an element of their lock-in strategy.
Would raganwald be writing his essay if he owned his data and could easily export it from Posterous?
Or would he have just exported his data and imported it into another blogging service?
People have been asking Posterous for a data export solution FOR YEARS, and Posterous NEVER supplied one.
There is backuperous, but that's some guy's project and doesn't save media.
I wanted to learn more, so I wrote my own data export tool in elisp -- it took me a couple of weeks to do so, with the main task being learning elisp and how the url package works, and now I feel confident I can get the data in several client's blogs back from Posterous and import it into another blogging service. But it will surely be a pain in the butt.
So while you are looking for a) and b), also look for c) companies that allow you to own your own data and export it and back it up.
On that scale, Posterous is/was always just absolutely terrible for their customers, and at the risk of alienating people here, I absolutely condemn Posterous and their behavior in this manner.
Posterous had years to supply a backup/export solution and consistently, and clearly intentionally, failed to do so. In contrast, I wrote my own backup solution in a very short time. There was no technical reason why Posterous could not supply a backup solution. And the resources required were minimal, almost trival. That they did no do so indicates this was part of a strategy of customer lock-in, and was a value-subtract to customers, not a value-add, and just abusive of the customer in general.
Here at HN, we love to laud the founders and act all clubby with them, but ya know, what Posterous did to its users by failing to provide a backup was just terrible and shame on Posterous' founders for using the user's data as an element of their lock-in strategy.