“Use Posterous,” they said. “It’s easy. Just write your posts there. No need to run your own blog.”
Today, Posterous announced they’ll shut down in 3 months.
On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.
Posterous will no longer be available to either view or edit. Boom. Gone.
Yet another hosted service that made it so super-easy to do stuff that you’d never ever have to waste time running your own stuff, because only stupid luddites that don’t get how awesome hosted services are would bother to waste their time doing that.
If you don’t manage your own online stuff, it will eventually disappear. If you do manage your own stuff, you need to have backups so that you can spin your stuff up on a different hosting provider when your current provider disappears.
Reclaim. Own your stuff. Step up. Pick up your game, people.
We should start a list of reasons, because there are many:
– service may shut down
– service may start to do things you don’t like (e.g. facebook privacy invasions etc)
– service tries to lock in your data
– service only allows you to play with services in their eco-system/doesn’t play nice on the open web
This isn’t meant to be exhaustive. But the longer the list you have, the more tactical you can be in conversation with specific people/communities and focus on the ones that resonate more for them. This is the challenge if we want to overcome “but this [silo’d corporate approach] is just so easy” rationalizations, help people understand in terms that are relevant to concerns they actually get why what seems “easy” actually isn’t in their best interest.
When I talk to students usually the one that resonates the most with them is “Have you ever been tagged in a photo on Facebook that was embarrassing or worse? Even if you try to be as strict as possible about your privacy on Facebook, it’s only as good as the next time Zuckerberg decides to change all the settings for you.” but that also gets into the discussion of how it is impossible to control what other people post about you online, and how important it is that you have an identity online in a space that you control so you become the authority for the question “Who is this person? Tell me more about them” when people search your name on Google.
the traditional “google your name. now, how many of those results are accurate? how many are things that you have any level of control over? how many will disappear at the whim of some third party some day?”
I really like that idea. the problem is, most people just don’t seem to care. they’ll do something, if they do it at all, because it’s easy. and won’t consider what it means to be using a hosted service vs. something you own. or copyright. or any of a bajillion other things that we kind of take for granted as being core parts of why we do things…
D’Arcy, I’m pretty much following your lead on this. I’ve ditched Delicious in favor of Scuttle (or, more accurately, Delicious ditched me), I’ve ditched Flickr, I’ve ditched Google Reader…I call it websteading (like homesteading on the web, get it? 🙂
Anyway, it’s still relatively hard/expensive for “regular” people to host their own photos/blogs/etc.
I do it because I’m a nerd. But I’m not sure I can convince my Mom to get setup with Linode…