Don’t Get Too Cozy With One App or Web Service
There’s a saying that goes, “What happens online, stays online. Forever.” But in the case of mobile apps and blogging platforms, many are here today and gone tomorrow.
Witness the closure of once-popular social/blogging sites Hipster and Posterous. The lesson to draw from their demise is one that Marketing Tango has touched on before: don’t rely solely on “free” social sites like Facebook and others for your online brand presence. It could all go away suddenly when it gets acquired, or goes kaput, as in these two cases.
So Long, Posterous
Posterous, the pioneering site that elegantly integrated blogging with email, announced it will “turn off” on April 30, after being acquired by Twitter:
“Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.
On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter.”
TechCrunch commenter BobRodkin summarized the frustration of bloggers who made the switch from other platforms to make Posterous their digital home, only to be evicted with a scant two months’ notice:
“I jumped from Blogger to be an early adopter of Posterous.
…Call it what it is so the faithful can move on. Instead you string them along with false promises and then give them two months to find another blog engine.”
Goodbye, Hipster