2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because
i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy
ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here
iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google
If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't.
There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move.
Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.
In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers.
Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.
In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue:
a) You will lose all of your page rank
b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link
Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to play down their concern?
Posted from my MacBook
I'm no "pro blogger" by any means, but I have a couple of posts (that were migrated from stand-alone pages) that get a decent amount of traffic. A large portion of that traffic is from forums, other blog posts, and the like. Not from "Google juice". To change that URL means I'd have to contact all of those people - hardly workable.
I don't really care about the page rank, but I have content people find useful and I want them to continue to be able to find it.
If you have other priorities, that's cool; just know that this is a feature that's definitely going to bring you more users.
It wouldn't be that bad if you could change the slug/url but, as the article correctly points out, you can't.
Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same time...
I think you're mistaken.
I would procrastinate for weeks before implementing something like this. It's boring, complex, and affects a tiny minority of users.
However to engineers like me, we have to remember that even though the number of end-users might be small, in this case they are inherently more valuable than the average user. They bring a cache of readers with them and if they like the user experience, can potentially evangelize the product for you more effectively than someone starting a blog from scratch can.
DNS will resolve to posterous' servers. It's out of your old server's control by that point.
Unless you're talking about different domains, e.g. moving from
mycoolblog.com self hosted -> myawesomeblog.com on posterous
in that case you could do what you said, but I don't think that's what the OP is talking about. the issue is when you use the same domain on both.
