Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams | Hacker News Reader

Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams

adrianscott.org

18 pointsadrianscott27 comments

Absolutely can’t stand the inexcusably large mouseover area around the yellow "Posterous" links at the top of these blogs. That's the truly obnoxious thing here

Other themes have less obtrusive versions with transparent logos. Most people end up leaving the basic theme because that's what simplicity is about -- reducing the number of choices. People who care a lot can change it. Most people don't care.

I think it's more an issue of most people don't care enough to send you a message about it. It's still extremely annoying and frustrating, because often times it simply won't go away, and so I have to move my cursor back and forth a bunch of times until it decides to disappear.

You're right -- I misunderstood your initial comment. I'm going to think about this some more. Really appreciate the feedback.

I also find the wording a bit strong, too: ”Shouldn’t you?” My snarky response is “Only if I wanted all my content to have an obnoxious yellow thing at the top that cheapens my personal brand.” Politely put, I find it offputting and presumptuous. “So can you” is a similar message that’s much less aggressive.

You can just get rid of it by editing your theme.

Really? A while ago it would add itself back at render time even if the block is removed from your theme template.

Totally agree... one thing you can do with custom themes is move that link all the way to the bottom of the page.

Wait. How was that a "scandal"?

Honestly I wish the title of the blog post was a link. From feedback I have received, it is very difficult to know where to click to read the entire post.

We would love to be able to put the full blog post title in there. The Facebook Stream API limits what we can put in that space.

I think this is a good candidate for an advanced setting. For other autopost sites we allow customization here. We'll discuss with the team.

I'm a Posterous user and I really like the service but it has been interesting to watch the moves they have made lately since Tumblr has been getting a lot of positive press.

I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in order to compete with Tumblr.

This was literally a bug fix due to user complaint about blog name truncation. There is no conspiracy here.

It's not really a branding grab. The reason is pretty simple. We were contacted by Facebook because our stream stories were in violation of their terms of service, which forbid "Calls to action" in the body of the stream story. For instance, take a look at the old style stories we used to publish:

http://skitch.com/vincentchu/dne9u/facebook-vincent-chu

In this example, the "Read more on postmodern babbler" text was in violation and we were asked to remove it. So we did. But I still wanted people to have a "Read more" call to action somewhere, so I put it in the "Action links" area. Unfortunately that field is only 25 characters long. We've found that most people's blog titles will not fit into 25 characters. In fact, we've seen blogs where truncating the action link after 25 characters leads to some unfortunate text. For instance:

"Read more on Vince's Analytics Site" would become "Read more on Vince's Anal"

So in the interest of not creating bad looking text, we changed the text

Hi Vincent, Thanks for your comment. My comments below: 1. The facebook issue you mention was already in the past. To clarify, this concern is not about that. This is about after you made the change for that, and then did an additional change of taking out the blog name.

2. I totally respect if it was not Posterous' intent per se to do a 'brand grab'. At the same time, if we look at the change it is clear that it is now +more Posterous brand, and - less individual blog brand. For example, Posterous changed the wording to 'Read more on Posterous' and not 'Read more on my blog'. So in that context, it is at least a 'Posterous brand enlargement', and a 'user brand removal'.

3. As I mention previously I suggest that the team be concerned about the brand perception they are creating. I recommend you speak with trusted outsiders to get some independent feedback on this. Posterous would benefit significantly from better communication. significantly...

4. Garry requested constructive suggestions and several members have replied with suggestions that can work without needing to have an option. Can we have feedback from Posterous about these suggestions? (I think the overall suggestion is that for names > than the max # of chars, use just the first letter of the 'border-crossing' word, followed by an ellipsis character.) (I suggest you discuss it in your blog rather than here, though feel free to do so here as well).

5. Users are giving you some valuable feedback here that you can use to increase the value of your offering, the value of your corporation and also your long-term profits. I hope you will appreciate this free feedback and find a way to leverage it.

6. Bloggers do care very much about building brands for their blogs, so this area can be high value add for your service offering.

7. In terms of not wanting to announce all of the many changes you discuss making, how do you wish for us users and potentially paying customers to communicate feedback to you?

8. We would not be investing the time to provide you with this feedback if we were not big fans overall of your offering, and appreciative of the work you've put into it.

9. If you feel that you'd prefer simplicity over providing users branding capabilities, can you recommend another solution for us? You already offer many great branding capabilities, such as the domain name mapping, and favicon.ico setting capability, which were key features in my decision to try out your platform. I have less urge to post now though, admittedly.

I hope these comments and this feedback help!

As icey said in a comment on the blog post, you could probably fix that with "Read more on Vince's A..."

That doesn't really solve the problem: "Bob's Assault on Stupidity" becomes "Read more on Bob's Ass..."

Arbitrary truncation of English text is guaranteed to result in amusing edge cases. Besides, how often does a blog title fit into 25 - len("Read more on ") - len("...") = 9 characters? I couldn't even find a posterous that wouldn't truncate under that rule. Truncation is ugly- it should be a worst-case exception, not something applied to every single post.

I think kyro's point is: if you're going to truncate a word, truncate following the initial letter, then you can't possibly form an undesired word.

Thanks for the clarification.

There could be problems with truncation with "..." as well.

For instance, I can imagine the following trunactions:

"Anal...", "Ass...", etc.

I guess the problem really is the truncation. Hard to know what you're going to get.

I don't really think what Posterous is doing is a big deal to begin with, but I think people know that the elipses means the content has been truncated. There are enough sites out there that automatically truncate words that I don't think many people would be up in arms if they saw something that truncated down to "Anal..." or "Ass..." or whatever.

If you need to truncate the word, keep the initial letter, then use the "…" character (one char instead of 3). That lets you signify words as late as pos 24.

As someone who used to look favorably on Tumblr, I will never recommend or use them again after seeing their response to the Pitchfork domain situation (ref url, you'll have to dig through the comments for the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129450)

> the last post [on the previous pitchfork.tumblr.com] that had been made was on November 18, 2009, and said, “This filter is obsolete.” The post before that was from March 21.

Sounds like a non-issue

FYI, the title of this link was changed by HN. The new title does not reflect the point that not only were the site names removed, but that the Posterous brand was used in place of them -- even though the link can go to a domain name other than posterous, for blogs using domain name mapping.

Such a great opportunity for a founder's blog to step up and say, hey we're a maturing business, here's this new setting, here's how to opt-out if you don't like it.

Gives them 95% of the value and 0% of the internets coming down on them.

If you add a setting every time someone throws a hissy fit, you're going to have a lot of settings.

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