I'm a Posterous user and I really like the service but it has been interesting to watch the moves they have made lately since Tumblr has been getting a lot of positive press.
I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in order to compete with Tumblr.
It's not really a branding grab. The reason is pretty simple. We were contacted by Facebook because our stream stories were in violation of their terms of service, which forbid "Calls to action" in the body of the stream story. For instance, take a look at the old style stories we used to publish:
In this example, the "Read more on postmodern babbler" text was in violation and we were asked to remove it. So we did. But I still wanted people to have a "Read more" call to action somewhere, so I put it in the "Action links" area. Unfortunately that field is only 25 characters long. We've found that most people's blog titles will not fit into 25 characters. In fact, we've seen blogs where truncating the action link after 25 characters leads to some unfortunate text. For instance:
"Read more on Vince's Analytics Site" would become "Read more on Vince's Anal"
So in the interest of not creating bad looking text, we changed the text
Hi Vincent, Thanks for your comment. My comments below:
1. The facebook issue you mention was already in the past. To clarify, this concern is not about that. This is about after you made the change for that, and then did an additional change of taking out the blog name.
2. I totally respect if it was not Posterous' intent per se to do a 'brand grab'. At the same time, if we look at the change it is clear that it is now +more Posterous brand, and - less individual blog brand. For example, Posterous changed the wording to 'Read more on Posterous' and not 'Read more on my blog'. So in that context, it is at least a 'Posterous brand enlargement', and a 'user brand removal'.
3. As I mention previously I suggest that the team be concerned about the brand perception they are creating. I recommend you speak with trusted outsiders to get some independent feedback on this. Posterous would benefit significantly from better communication. significantly...
4. Garry requested constructive suggestions and several members have replied with suggestions that can work without needing to have an option. Can we have feedback from Posterous about these suggestions? (I think the overall suggestion is that for names > than the max # of chars, use just the first letter of the 'border-crossing' word, followed by an ellipsis character.) (I suggest you discuss it in your blog rather than here, though feel free to do so here as well).
5. Users are giving you some valuable feedback here that you can use to increase the value of your offering, the value of your corporation and also your long-term profits. I hope you will appreciate this free feedback and find a way to leverage it.
6. Bloggers do care very much about building brands for their blogs, so this area can be high value add for your service offering.
7. In terms of not wanting to announce all of the many changes you discuss making, how do you wish for us users and potentially paying customers to communicate feedback to you?
8. We would not be investing the time to provide you with this feedback if we were not big fans overall of your offering, and appreciative of the work you've put into it.
9. If you feel that you'd prefer simplicity over providing users branding capabilities, can you recommend another solution for us? You already offer many great branding capabilities, such as the domain name mapping, and favicon.ico setting capability, which were key features in my decision to try out your platform. I have less urge to post now though, admittedly.
That doesn't really solve the problem: "Bob's Assault on Stupidity" becomes "Read more on Bob's Ass..."
Arbitrary truncation of English text is guaranteed to result in amusing edge cases. Besides, how often does a blog title fit into 25 - len("Read more on ") - len("...") = 9 characters? I couldn't even find a posterous that wouldn't truncate under that rule. Truncation is ugly- it should be a worst-case exception, not something applied to every single post.
I don't really think what Posterous is doing is a big deal to begin with, but I think people know that the elipses means the content has been truncated. There are enough sites out there that automatically truncate words that I don't think many people would be up in arms if they saw something that truncated down to "Anal..." or "Ass..." or whatever.
If you need to truncate the word, keep the initial letter, then use the "…" character (one char instead of 3). That lets you signify words as late as pos 24.
As someone who used to look favorably on Tumblr, I will never recommend or use them again after seeing their response to the Pitchfork domain situation (ref url, you'll have to dig through the comments for the original: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=1129450)
> the last post [on the previous pitchfork.tumblr.com] that had been made was on November 18, 2009, and said, “This filter is obsolete.” The post before that was from March 21.
This is true if you stay up all night trying to finish a project and then you have to go into the office the next day. The only way to keep yourself awake and alert is by consuming a higher amount of caffeine and calories than you normally would.
I've always thought that the f and t motions along with I and A to switch to insert mode, and . (repeat) should be included in the basic motions and text objects should be the next step.
They're relatively simple to remember and you can string them together to accomplish a lot more than the character-wise to word-wise motion progression I've seen in most vim intros.
"The real number could be arrived by studying competition, market size, target audience, perceived value of your service and many other factors."
It would be helpful if someone did a study on pricing plans of popular web apps and could show how the pricing models affected the overall success of the apps in their own markets.
We've started to collect "pricing urls" on Cloudomatic.com I've been thinking of doing a few things with all of these pages. One is: how many plans are there on average? How many have a free trial and average length? Average price for a saas app.
Another is talking to a good chunk of startups and doing a: this is how you determine pricing white paper.
I'd say yes, but not because I know it will be useful, but because I think it would be interesting to compare people's marketing and customer segmenting strategies.
Since I am in deciding stage of pricing for my application, I studied the market and researched how pricing plans evolved for a SaaS startup. Shall make a blog post soon.
For example, if a product has a good price, but poor targeting (saying "this is for you!" to a niche or type of person/business), or the net they cast for traffic is too broad (e.g. people from Digg), they are not going to have success selling plans, period.
In other words: There's no price that is good enough to sell a boob job to a man, for himself.
Take, for example, the idea that Honeywell was trying to sell mainframes to house wives. They did -- everybody did in the 70s, because they were dumb as a box of rocks.
Take the same mainframe and sell it to a bank.
The data for the first attempted sale (housewives) would make you think "Gee, that price is too high! They're not selling."
For the second, the price could be the same, but the audience would actually buy it.
If you don't qualify whether a business is doing a shit job of targeting, your market pricing data is absolutely worthless.
I'm not sure how a completely obvious lie is a brilliant marketing move. Granted, lying has worked for some companies before, but personally I think this is likely to do more to hurt Jobs reputation than to help it.
I was under the impression that Wall Street typically develops and hosts in-house, regarding both algorithms and operations as competitive advantages. Is that incorrect, or is there some other reason to obfuscate?
The SEC proposal in question is talking about making these available (publicly if I read this correctly) when defining new securities:
> We also are proposing to require that, with some exceptions, prospectuses for public offerings of asset-backed securities and ongoing Exchange Act reports contain specified asset-level information about each of the assets in the pool. The asset-level information would be provided according to proposed standards and in a tagged data format using eXtensible Markup Language (XML). In addition, we are proposing to require, along with the prospectus filing, the filing of a computer program of the contractual cash flow provisions expressed as downloadable source code in Python...
Decorators, generators and all the other syntactic sugar that's been added over the years is already too much experimentation with obfuscation for my liking.
Heck, just pushing up the demand for Python devs is a good thing. Rising tide lifts all boats. Probably indirectly raise the boats of non-Python devs as well.
Accounting is one of those things that I drag my feet to learn and practice (along with taxes) when I would rather be coding.
Xero is the best app that I've found for keeping the day to day record keeping simple but you still need an accountant to have as a resource to ask questions and to check the books, especially around tax time.
I also wouldn't mind an app that's a virtual environment with bash, ssh, gIt, sqlite, django, a Safari tab, and Vim. If that existed I would buy an iPad tomorrow.
I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in order to compete with Tumblr.