This is well said and reflects my experience. These days I look for services that a) take money, b) probably won't get acquired soon. (a) is easier than (b), but if you look around you'll eventually find something.
Good examples are:
* Instapaper — Marco's one-man-shop, stable and profitable,
* Smugmug — family owned, users pay them money, stable and profitable,
* Dropbox — which I also pay for — but is still unlikely to find an acquirer.
I recently decided not to sign on several new services because I couldn't see a business model.
I'd like pg to address this in one of his essays, given that YC is all about building stuff people want without paying too much attention to the business side of things (e.g. actual cash flow), and with the explicit goal of reaching an exit for the founders.
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.
YC seems (I obviously don't speak for them) to like companies like Smugmug and Instapaper --- see what Graham writes about Wufoo --- and over the long term, companies with established niches can obtain valuations that outstrip that niche. Black swans happen, and it's good to maximize your exposure to the good ones.
But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often not worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies.
The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies.
So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.
Why do you think dropbox is unlikely to find an acquirer? Because they're too proud to get absorbed into Apple?
I can easily see them being a massive acqui-hire, as they've solved the problems Apple, Google, and Microsoft (lexicographical order) have been trying to solve for years, and I mean the technical problems and also the marketing problems.
I don't pay for dropbox. I love it, but I could replace the utility it affords me with a couple of shell scripts and an S3 instance in a heartbeat.
I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around.
I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me.
I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again?
"I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around. I've got my website on Tumblr ..."
The sensible middle ground is to host your site anywhere you want, but only using your own domain. If someone pulls a Posterous, you just point your domain at the next vendor, export from old and import to new.
Same with email. Your address should be under a domain that you own, then you can host your email anywhere that allows you to use your own domain. Even gmail does this.
I think it's a little .----- and more than a little hyperbolic to suggest that Posterous wasn't a business, but rather just an exhibit for the team's portfolio.
The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly.
I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair.
But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in?
I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.
There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. I apologise if it comes across that way.
I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.
FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood.
The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan.
So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.
I'm still getting upmodded for this but 'raganwald graciously fixed my concern with the article; if I could edit the comment, I would. 'raganwald is a stand-up guy.
Posterous took investment not only from venture capital, but also from users who believed and trusted that the service would find a way to make money and stick around. It hasn't repaid that investment. This feels like a turning point to me as I have no incentive to start investing as a user with the next hot startup that comes along.
I'm not sure if it's the architects fault or the real estate investors. Land is so cheap, and investors seem to really like watching architects build stuff. For a long time, investors have believed if there are people in the building, the coffee bar or the valet parking will make them a lot of money.
The problem is that it has also conditioned people to believe that all office space should be free. Those who build incredibly efficient office space are still going to have a hard time charging rent.
These architect aquisitions are every bit as much about the investors as they are the architects. Until investors get selective and demand real value, I'm not sure it's going away.
(Wow, I might need to go to prison for extended torture of an analogy.)
Yeah, this has happened a number of times, enough that I'm wary of investing time and energy into using a service that appears to not have any means of making money. Last fall, I evaluated Posterous for my personal blog, but one of the reasons I ended up going with Squarespace instead is because it's a paid service:
I don't think being a paid service makes it more likely that it will be around forever, but it is a good input to use when weighing and comparing different services. I would probably place as much emphasis on data portability and content license terms.
This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for-like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.
I use Posterous, Weebly, Hacker News, and twitter, and love them all. I don't pay a nickel to any of them and never will.
I hope very much that they all last forever.
But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds.
<HN201203141055.txt>
[UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]
I assume that Reginald's complain was not about the data itself, but about the fact that he will now have to move his blog elsewhere - the drag of setting it up, and making sure that everyone can find it.
If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.
You know, I was more than willing to "agree to disagree" until I read this. Sorry, but I just don't buy the idea that I should spend 95% of my time in front of a computer writing code. I don't think it's practical or even preferable.
Writing things other than code is a useful thing for a hacker. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt pg, does it? Plus, I can't think of very many people whose emails I've read (myself included) who wouldn't benefit from more writing practice.
It's worth mentioning that, if you're not doing regular backups of your hard drive, storing something on your hard drive as a "backup" is a gargantuanly bad idea. Use AWS or some other redundant cloud solution; the likelihood of Amazon shutting down AWS within the next <X> <time unit>s is a lot smaller than the likelihood that your hard drive will fail in the same timeframe.
Interesting. How do you deal with / save / manage permalinks and inbound links from other sites? Or is it a case of those are just not important enough to worry about? (Since Google has a record of all the content it believes is currently on the Web)
"If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it."
I'm a hacker but I'm also a blogger, marketer, entrepreneur and many other things. And I am sure many other users here also are. The idea that you should only write code all the time is flawed, at best.
And hard drives crash. And other backups also can get lost.
But I agree one shouldn't worry much about online data being lost. And for any data you really care about, have some backups, yes.
What exactly do people do with this data, specifically for sites like hackernews? I don't think I've ever particularly cared about my own comments. Without context they are pretty much useless anyway.
I plan on taking this approach and moving my blog to GitHub Pages w/ Jekyll. That way it will all be neatly backed up in a local repo as well, with the benefit of version control.
edit: Has anyone here migrated from Google Sites to Jekyll before?
Interesting idea. I do a similar thing with OneNote on long outgoing mails that I write that take a long time to compose.
However, how do you deal with threaded conversations and tracking the 1 liner replies to those mails? There are a large # of mails that I write that fall into this category.
Someone I know wrote his own email client that is essentially a long text buffer where email conversations are persisted to a single text file. He has commands that allow him to select portions of text from that file to compose in his replies. He's used that system since the 1980's and still has all of his email from back then logged into individual files.
That's what scripting is for! 10 minutes with Python + lxml and I have a script that saves everything I write to a text file (usually in JSON to keep the structure).
For example, I use Read It Later, so I wrote a script to fetch the URLs and then use wget to mirror each URL.
Tumblr is even easier: open the e.g. Liked page, use xdotool in a bash loop to keep pressing pagedown, then just save the page with the browser itself.
"But I will lose nothing..." Oh come now - surely your time was valuable. And your enthusiasm/willingness to give another service hours and hours of your time for the hope that they will be around "forever" will almost certainly wane if these services went down for the count.
The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks.
Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way:
It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on Pocahontas was significantly better.
Took me a minute or so to figure what he was talking about. I am not sure what the greater message is, here. Was Posterous "evil" for selling themselves to Twitter? Or, should users generally beware any company that does not have a revenue? At what level of revenue should users stop worrying? Not saying that it is likely, but should users of Dropbox worry that Apple will acquire them?
Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.
I think it is an interesting point that people get more value out of your product when they are invested in it.
When friends call me for marketing advice, I enjoy talking about it, and am always willing to share some insight for free, but this makes me wonder if I am doing them a disservice.
Odds are, they just resent the advice, or even if they agree with it, how likely are they to use it if it's free.
Seems like sharing ideas and free advice is a lose-lose.
If you really want to help people, make them pay for it!
In my limited but growing experience dealing with free and paid users, I see it this way: when a customer pays for your product, it's like they're saying "I trust you." When you charge for something, you are asking for someone's trust because you believe in what you've created. You owe it to yourself to make people pay for what you build.
Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move?
The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid.
Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary.
For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.
I think that Reginald is talking about social media platforms' APIs and other infrastructure that 3rd parties can connect to for whatever business they are in.
It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service.
Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have.
I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them.
The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.
I think we're currently in the era of the government-funded type of web projects that serve a great purpose for a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise be willing to pay for them. Right now the climate is such that developers with an idea can very inexpensively get that idea built and used, which can in turn, bolster their own resumes or possibly even result in an IPO exit or acquisition.
Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.
Putting the onus on contributors to back up what they publish would be a crap shot; even with backups there may not be a plan for recovery, and recovery may be impossible if the contributor is unable or unwilling to handle it themselves.
Commenters and other participants have it even harder, due to the variety of sites and platforms they participate in (Lazarus can help saving one's own comments now that CoComment is shutting down, wget can be used to rescue content with advance warning).
Maybe the best alternative would be a commitment from the platforms to keep a low-bandwidth, possibly throttled archive available; failing that, to outsource the work to an organisation like the internet archive. This would be a step up from the current standard, which is, at best, a period of warning (lets external participants make backups), or a commitment to data liberation, which unfortunately ends up with many contributors failing to republish their content.
It's probably well worth questioning the value of any of this crap above and beyond whatever immediate social value it gives. I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages?
It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably not worthwhile to be a digital packrat.
the onus already is on consumers to back up their stuff. nobody else is doing it for you, if you don't want to lose your stuff you'd better back it up.
relying on anybody else to do backups for you is the crapshoot. doing it yourself is really the only way to be sure.
This reminds me of the advert Google put out recently where it shows a father documenting his daughters life in YouTube, and sending her emails (from birth) with the videos on with a note of what it was all about in the email. She comes back to the email 20 years later and sees the document of her life with it all in.
I just don't buy it, how do we know Google will be around in 20 years, never mind free solutions not supplemented with paid for services?
Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is secure, nothing is forever. I wish I could say I could make a solution that would ease this problem but my solution might not stand the test of time. Shit happens! Saving it to your hard drive means you are only backing it up to something that could explode (dramatisation). Further backing up to the cloud is relying again on a solution that you are expecting to work and stick around, it may not!
You need to go into any situation like this with some level of acknowledgement that it just might not work.
For a second, he had me thinking that there were actually cool office buildings somewhere filled with interesting people providing free office space complete with coffee bars.
That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.
This happens repeatedly outside the startup world as well. The company I work for has relied on technology that Microsoft developed, supported, and subsequently walked away from. That is the nature of both business and technology.
[+] [-] jwr|14 years ago|reply
Good examples are:
* Instapaper — Marco's one-man-shop, stable and profitable,
* Smugmug — family owned, users pay them money, stable and profitable,
* Dropbox — which I also pay for — but is still unlikely to find an acquirer.
I recently decided not to sign on several new services because I couldn't see a business model.
I'd like pg to address this in one of his essays, given that YC is all about building stuff people want without paying too much attention to the business side of things (e.g. actual cash flow), and with the explicit goal of reaching an exit for the founders.
[+] [-] jerrya|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often not worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies.
The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies.
So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.
[+] [-] leif|14 years ago|reply
I can easily see them being a massive acqui-hire, as they've solved the problems Apple, Google, and Microsoft (lexicographical order) have been trying to solve for years, and I mean the technical problems and also the marketing problems.
I don't pay for dropbox. I love it, but I could replace the utility it affords me with a couple of shell scripts and an S3 instance in a heartbeat.
[+] [-] dhotson|14 years ago|reply
I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me.
I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again?
Also, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on the topic of being a free user not that long ago: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
The TL;DR version was: Exploding growth + free service = losing lots of money. Ouch.
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] read_wharf|14 years ago|reply
The sensible middle ground is to host your site anywhere you want, but only using your own domain. If someone pulls a Posterous, you just point your domain at the next vendor, export from old and import to new.
Same with email. Your address should be under a domain that you own, then you can host your email anywhere that allows you to use your own domain. Even gmail does this.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] didgeoridoo|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly.
I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair.
But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in?
I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.
FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood.
The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan.
So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] preavy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
The problem is that it has also conditioned people to believe that all office space should be free. Those who build incredibly efficient office space are still going to have a hard time charging rent.
These architect aquisitions are every bit as much about the investors as they are the architects. Until investors get selective and demand real value, I'm not sure it's going away.
(Wow, I might need to go to prison for extended torture of an analogy.)
[+] [-] jacquesm|14 years ago|reply
For that reason alone I would never consider hosting something like a blog on real estate owned by another party.
Another risk is that the domain sooner or later ends up in the hands of some scammer or pill pusher.
[+] [-] kylec|14 years ago|reply
http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous...
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for-like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.
[+] [-] edw519|14 years ago|reply
I hope very much that they all last forever.
But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds.
<HN201203141055.txt>
[UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]
[+] [-] pixelcort|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|14 years ago|reply
You know, I was more than willing to "agree to disagree" until I read this. Sorry, but I just don't buy the idea that I should spend 95% of my time in front of a computer writing code. I don't think it's practical or even preferable.
Writing things other than code is a useful thing for a hacker. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt pg, does it? Plus, I can't think of very many people whose emails I've read (myself included) who wouldn't benefit from more writing practice.
[+] [-] eykanal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Isofarro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] handzhiev|14 years ago|reply
I'm a hacker but I'm also a blogger, marketer, entrepreneur and many other things. And I am sure many other users here also are. The idea that you should only write code all the time is flawed, at best.
And hard drives crash. And other backups also can get lost.
But I agree one shouldn't worry much about online data being lost. And for any data you really care about, have some backups, yes.
[+] [-] methodin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reledi|14 years ago|reply
edit: Has anyone here migrated from Google Sites to Jekyll before?
[+] [-] localhost|14 years ago|reply
However, how do you deal with threaded conversations and tracking the 1 liner replies to those mails? There are a large # of mails that I write that fall into this category.
Someone I know wrote his own email client that is essentially a long text buffer where email conversations are persisted to a single text file. He has commands that allow him to select portions of text from that file to compose in his replies. He's used that system since the 1980's and still has all of his email from back then logged into individual files.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
For example, I use Read It Later, so I wrote a script to fetch the URLs and then use wget to mirror each URL.
Tumblr is even easier: open the e.g. Liked page, use xdotool in a bash loop to keep pressing pagedown, then just save the page with the browser itself.
[+] [-] charlieok|14 years ago|reply
Which would be a very useful tool indeed.
[+] [-] ScottWhigham|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks.
Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way:
It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on Pocahontas was significantly better.
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoelMcCracken|14 years ago|reply
Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html
Notes:
1. An interesting story itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
[+] [-] davemel37|14 years ago|reply
When friends call me for marketing advice, I enjoy talking about it, and am always willing to share some insight for free, but this makes me wonder if I am doing them a disservice.
Odds are, they just resent the advice, or even if they agree with it, how likely are they to use it if it's free.
Seems like sharing ideas and free advice is a lose-lose.
If you really want to help people, make them pay for it!
[+] [-] zeedog|14 years ago|reply
Maybe Aladdin said it best...do you trust me? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ)
[+] [-] nkurz|14 years ago|reply
Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move?
The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid.
Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary.
For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|14 years ago|reply
It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service.
Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have.
I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them.
The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.
[+] [-] dkrich|14 years ago|reply
Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.
[+] [-] obtu|14 years ago|reply
Putting the onus on contributors to back up what they publish would be a crap shot; even with backups there may not be a plan for recovery, and recovery may be impossible if the contributor is unable or unwilling to handle it themselves.
Commenters and other participants have it even harder, due to the variety of sites and platforms they participate in (Lazarus can help saving one's own comments now that CoComment is shutting down, wget can be used to rescue content with advance warning).
Maybe the best alternative would be a commitment from the platforms to keep a low-bandwidth, possibly throttled archive available; failing that, to outsource the work to an organisation like the internet archive. This would be a step up from the current standard, which is, at best, a period of warning (lets external participants make backups), or a commitment to data liberation, which unfortunately ends up with many contributors failing to republish their content.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably not worthwhile to be a digital packrat.
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
relying on anybody else to do backups for you is the crapshoot. doing it yourself is really the only way to be sure.
[+] [-] chrislomax|14 years ago|reply
I just don't buy it, how do we know Google will be around in 20 years, never mind free solutions not supplemented with paid for services?
Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is secure, nothing is forever. I wish I could say I could make a solution that would ease this problem but my solution might not stand the test of time. Shit happens! Saving it to your hard drive means you are only backing it up to something that could explode (dramatisation). Further backing up to the cloud is relying again on a solution that you are expecting to work and stick around, it may not!
You need to go into any situation like this with some level of acknowledgement that it just might not work.
[+] [-] charlieok|14 years ago|reply
That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.
[+] [-] ryanoneill|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgrass|14 years ago|reply