Twitter Acquires Posterous

Saw the announcement that Posterous has been acquired by Twitter (↬ h/t infoneert)— which doesn’t have very much other information, aside from the ominous statement that directions for moving to other services will be posted soon — and I immediately thought Twitter’s weakest link: direct messaging. DMing in Twitter is pathological, it’s so bad. And especially the lack of group private messaging.

So, imagine Twitter using Posterous as a way to support group private messaging, since Posterous does that today.

Several questions if they go that way:

  1. Will this new sort of private messaging be limited to 140 characters? (I bet they will be, at least the day that Twitter decides to relax that limitation everywhere.)
  2. Will group private messaging require defining a group, or will they be ad hoc? Will it be possible to invite users to a group after the fact, and catch up on historical updates there? (That’s how Posterous works now, more or less like a private blog.)

It’s easy to see how Twitter could use a solution like Posterous as a way to move into the business market, allowing businesses to coordinate work internally on Twitter. This could make Twitter the most fundamental of work media tools. About time, guys.

Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network

Jennifer Van Grove via Mashable

Simple sharing service Posterous is shedding its blog origins in favor of becoming a full-featured social network.

The startup has dramatically redesigned its website, overhauled its user dashboard and vamped up its iPhone app with a retooled focus on private sharing. The new Posterous even has a new name: Posterous Spaces.

Posterous Spaces merges the startup’s two products — sites and groups — into one unified experience with a glossy new look and a stronger emphasis on sharing, social networking and content discovery.

Posterous might be headed in a dangerous direction, or perhaps might be too late for the party in open social streaming. And the capabilities of posterous posting at the present time are too minimal — just posts and comments — to compete against more fully fleshed-out work media offerings like Yammer and Podio for closed, business-oriented groups.

On the other hand, they are at least trying to stay up with social streaming leaders like Twitter and Tumblr, and new entrants, like Google+.

Goodbye /Message, Hello Stowe Boyd

Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, maybe I’m bored with old school blogging, maybe the petty annoyances of Squarespace have gotten to me; but whatever the cause, I am moving my blogging from the old /Message (located at www.stoweboyd.com/message) to Stowe Boyd (which is temporarily located at stoweboyd.tumblr.com).

I guess am dropping the more or less superfluous /Message, and making my blog eponymous since it has long been a solo effort, and the /Message overhead isn’t worth the confusion.

via Paul Robinson

For some period of time I plan to keep the old site up, and to slowly move the most important posts over here, and to leave behind a manual pointer and a javascript redirect at each moved post. After some (brief) period, I will redirect the domain here, and take down the old website altogether.

I am forced to these gyrations since a/ Tumblr has no import support whatsoever, and b/ Squarespace will let me export into  Moveable Type format, but will not let me redirect posts outside the domain name I am using there.

I had considered Posterous, but the themes seem very scanty there, and the only mechanism for importing is reading one of the existing services they know how to spider, which doesn’t include Squarespace. And at any rate, they don’t conserve the old URLs anyway.

In the next few days I will port over the most active and popular posts, and I will hire a teenager to start working on the archives.

I am forced to leave around 5000 comments behind; I will try to figure out some way to do something about that. Even using Disqus wouldn’t have helped, since all the URLs are screwed up.

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