I am deleting all of my photos from @twitpic and moving them to @posterous.
We all have to make choices and those choices usually are based on rationality or emotion. Last night I saw the first tweets in my timeline pointing to a story on TechCrunch that can be summarized in the following way:
- Posterous created a tool that allows its users to import all of their photos hosted on TwitPic with a touch of a button via RSS.
- TwitPic didn’t like it and blocked Posterous’ servers, thus telling their users that, if they want to move their photos, they will have to transfer them manually.
- Legal battle may ensue *insert dramatic soundtrack with laugh track*
TwitPic blocking Posterous’ servers is reason enough to ditch TwitPic and move to another service but l am going to try to explain the rationale around my decision.
Posterous is only supplying a service that makes life easier for its users and only to those users that want to import their TwitPic content to Posterous. It’s voluntary and users are given the choice.
What TwitPic is telling its users by blocking Posterous’ servers is: No bloody way you are putting all of your photos on another service. If you want to do that, you will have to do it the hard way, because we want you to stick with us even if it’s against your will.
Does this make sense? Not really. It sounds like something that Apple could come up with… oh wait! They do it all the time as do mobile carriers #fact
Am I the only one crying OVERREACTION!!! here? Is TwitPic’s management so out of touch with reality that it doesn’t understand their target audience or the open web any longer?
Posterous? TwitPic? YOU!
The fact that Posterous users want to import their photos (yes, the photos belong to the users not TwitPic) hosted at TwitPic doesn’t mean that they will stop using TwitPic.
The generation that uses all of these tools are curious and want to use whatever the next new feature is on any website/application/service but that doesn’t mean, at all, that they will stop using other services exclusively. Importing images from TwitPic via RSS will not remove the images from that site, it will just add them to one more location increasing the user’s mashup. There is no casual nexus between the two and to believe that is totally wrong. One example? I have tried Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Power Twitter, SNAPTU but my Twitter clients of choice still are Destroy Twitter and Gravity. Do I have the other applications still installed? Yes! Do I sporadically use them? Yes! Do I download the latest updates? Of course! #GeekLove
TwitPic’s management might not understand but, by blocking Posterous servers, they are actually admitting defeat; the move portrays that they think Posterous is way cooler than TwitPic and that the only solution they have is to do a wall-of-China-move to stay alive, to keep their user-base from flocking to Posterous. The irony is that this is not even true; TwitPic is integrated with the most popular Twitter clients used by millions every day. It recently introduced a user-tagging and geo-location system that is very promising and has an excellent track record for reliability.
These three reasons alone should be enough for TwitPic’s genius-team *insert dramatic soundtrack with laugh track echo echo echo* to see Posterous not as a threat but as healthy competition and, instead of losing time whining with a legal battle, they should be working on introducing new features that would attract new users and appease the current ones. What features? Slideshows, integration with Flickr, groups, a tagging system based on the content of the message field (that isn’t being used at the moment) come immediately to mind. Ah, and a visible “delete my TwitPic account” would also be nice. #justsayin
For all of these reasons I will stop using TwitPic today and will start using Posterous instead to post pictures to Twitter via my mobile phone.
Since I am not a Posterous fan boy, and only opened my account today, if I don’t like it I will start using another service that allows me to post pictures to Twitter in the same way. I will just make sure that it is a service that is not run by people that don’t understand that users do have, and want, a choice and realize behaving like a bully only makes you look like a loser.
For more info:
Posterous
Posterous on Twitter and founders Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan
P.s. Dear Noah, please take the advice of someone who works in the fashion business for the last 5 years: You should consider updating your 1997 MySpace-like avatar on Twitter (it is okay to keep it on MySpace, no one goes there anyway).
Strategist, Sound Designer, Electronic Music Producer, New Media Artist, Activist, Blogger, A&R of the 
