Not An Expert

I don’t know anything about websites, making them, coding them, hosting them or any of that stuff.  I’m just a blogger who needs to blog more and wants to be able to post content easily.  A few years ago on Twitter I kept seeing posts from this “dead-simple” blogging platform called Posterous.  I checked it out and loved it.  You could post by email, from a phone app or by web. So if the brilliant blog post came you could publish mind while in some random place, you could do it right there from our phone without even loggin in.  I went all in on Posterous and in 2009 purchased a domain name let Posterous do the hosting. Now after 138 posts I learn that they were acquired by Twitter.  Am I supposed to be happy about that?

Well I can tell you that I’m not.  Again as a blogger and not a tech person, the thought of having to move all of that content to another service just puts me in full freak-out mode.  I’ve done it twice.  Remember a service called VOX? Not an Expert started out there about three years ago.  They shut down and I moved it all to Typepad which was a mistake.  The service was just weird and seemed a bit old and limited so I moved again to WordPress, hopefully for good.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in love with WordPress either, but it’s not because the service isn’t good, it’s pretty feature rich, so rich that I can’t figure it all out.  Yet WordPress in the blogging world seems to be the standard and I thought it would be a relatively safe place to land.  That Posterous blog may land here too because I just don’t trust this acquisition.

Back in the stone age (the 80’s) during my first round of higher learning, Mergers and Acquisitions and “corporate raiders” were all the rage. They’d come in, rip up your company and sell the parts, basically killing it.  Here in the 21st century it seems that things haven’t changed much.  Just in my limited knowledge of the web and web-based companies, it seems that that old corporate raider style is en vogue.  A tech/social/web company gets gobbled up by the big boys some of the talent is retained but the product or service dies or morphs into something unrecognizable.

I am afraid that my “dead simple” posting days to Posterous will soon be over once Twitter gets fully hands on. I’d like to know what you think about the Twitter acquisition of Posterous.  Do you think the product will be improved or enhanced or are we witnessing what the guys below are talking about. Let me know in the comments.

h/t +Keith Wilson for inspiring this semi-rant