Posterous Targets Ning In Massive Switching Campaign. Who Is Next? | Hacker News Reader

Posterous Targets Ning In Massive Switching Campaign. Who Is Next?

techcrunch.com

40 pointsa4agarwal17 comments

Awesome! This is actually quite useful. I wish this could have happened earlier, but in any case, this makes it easier for groups to actively post more frequently (I tried using Google groups and Ning with group projects, but boy people are lazy).

Such an awesome way of seamless transition. If they keep doing it this way, then migration is more enticing for prospective users.

Sounds nice and dandy, but does it keep the URL architecture in place? If I want to move my blog to a new location, I would want to keep all the base URLs in place: for posts, archives (category and date), for tags, etc etc. Otherwise I loose search engine traffic and inter-connectivity between posts.

Can they do it?

I asked them this exact question a couple of weeks ago. Sachin actually answered himself and said they can't maintain old urls for now but are working on it.

Posterous feels a lot like my Mac did the first time I switched from Windows. It just works.

I'm guessing their scraping the sites content. From a quick Google search it seems that only very recently has their been an easy way to export your data from Ning? Pretty bad form for a network that has been around so long if that is the case.

I asked this on the TC comments, but do you have to own the Ning blog you want to copy to Posterous?

If not, and I can take anyone's Ning content and use it as my own, that's a big problem.

You can already do that with nothing more than a simple wget + sendmail script.

You can take any content published on the web and use it as your own… Sure, it's a very good idea to have some kind of verification (like "post this code on the site"? some kind of email verification? or at least send a mail to some contact on the copied site to inform the legitimate owner?), but still… you can just use copy&paste anyway. People are very skilled in it.

If this is the case, why doesn't Posterous just copy all the Ning blogs and say "hey! your already here!"?

Interesting idea, but I'm guessing users wouldn't really like that very much.

Because it's copyrighted?

I assume the parent comment was referring to the technical feasibility of reproducing content, not the legality.

Because someone would, very likely, sue them?

Easy fix to this would just be to get them to make a new blog entry with some keyword to indicate ownership.

Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad.

I guess Posterous itself is the next thing that will be switched to some next thing.

I really like posterous.

I'm wondering about wordpress - especially migrating to posterous from an installed wordpress site (rather than having a site on wordpress.com). One thing that is missing from posterous is the ability to put ads like google adsense...anyone know if this is coming? (I haven't seen any hints on their blogs)

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