How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?
Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.
Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.
When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.
Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.
I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.
On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt it will be awesome.
But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.
Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.
That said...
I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.
Thanks jbail -- I don't want to dig up the past, but the truth of the matter was I didn't agree with my cofounder on the direction of Posterous, but I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in. It was one of the most painful experiences to have to walk away from my baby.
I think we're put on this earth to create things of great lasting value that are good for others around us. Many things in our lives will change, but I believe this one is a constant guiding light.
> I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in
Support him? By bailing out? Was it easy for your cofounder to replace your skillset? Would love to hear the whole story if you don't mind, it could help help others who are in similar situations. It's sad that cofounders who once created something together are not able to find a common understanding in later stages. Sad that both parties reached that point where they have to utter the threat either my way or I leave. WTF. I know this is common and probably the reason why most startups fail but just leaving (or maybe the true story was different) sounds a bit strange. However, maybe it was the best decision for the organization.
VC funding is usually a decision to "go big or go home" on a timeframe, while bootstrapping allows you to continue indefinitely at any scale once revenues cover costs. Both have risks but the VC model is explicitly to spend at unsustainable levels in order to try to get big fast. That's kind of the whole point of VC. It isn't wrong or selling out, but you have to know what you're getting into (as founder, employee, or customer). If you spend way ahead of revenue to grow fast, and you don't go big, then you usually go home.
Nice work on the new site, the design looked great!
It's nice to see you acknowledge that things were rocky with Posterous but you are now moving forwards in a new direction based on your past learnings.
After all, isn't that one of the great things about being human? We can all learn from our past mistakes and strive to better than the person we were yesterday.
Apparently, that "independent" WordPress Foundation is still just Matt:
"From an ultimate decision-making point of view, the Foundation is mainly just me. [...] It’s worth noting that the Foundation was created purely to be a trademark and IP holding entity that Automattic could transfer its ownership of the WordPress trademark to. There are no “members.”" [0]
Without digging into the specifics of the matter,if the Foundation is indeed a 501(c)(3), the IRS should/will almost certainly have required it to have three independent board members.
In addition, having counseled clients on this structure, the benefit of creating a nonprofit and giving it IP is that it creates a public check on anything to do with that IP. For example, while a startup's founders can sell the company, they can't unilaterally agree to sell off the IP in the nonprofit, and the public can challenge any such sales by recourse to a state attorney general's office.
It's not perfect, but it helps protect the IP in the way founders want to. In many ways, it's a one-way decision, which is why it works.
since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".
second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.
This is one of the first features we will be launching in the next two weeks: Posterous import. This is a high priority as I have years of data on there as well. We're putting the finishing touches on it as we speak.
Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations because it separates the s. ie, it's not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide.
I think you are being a bit hard on tedunangst since his statement "Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred..." applies in situations different from your examples.
For example: "The Times (and some other publications, including the Chicago Manual of Style) do call for using an apostrophe in the plural of abbreviations that include periods."
By both those references, it's "URLs", not "URL's".
rubyrescue: since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".
tedunangst: Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations ... not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide
tedunangst claimed that was a style choice. It's not. By all these guides, "URL's" is wrong, and is something that would be corrected by editors using your examples of NYT or Chicago Manual of Style.
Also, for the periods, omitting the periods is often the cleanest answer. Instead of "C.P.A.'s" which is both ambiguous and ugly, consider "I went to my CPA's office. Naturally, it was full of CPAs."
You're safest following this line from your Wikipedia link: The MLA is explicit "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation". The APA is specific in "without an apostrophe".
OT: "grocer's apostrophe" -- never heard someone use that phrase, and I really like it. I see that all the time, and it makes my skin itch. I will be borrowing it frequently.
Just wondering: how can somebody start again something he worked already years on? I understand that you might learned a lot with Posterous and now you'd like to just employ that knowledge in a new blog project. But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years? You could loose time and after ten years looking back and you pity that you just worked only on blog systems. I don't want to talk blogs down, they are a very interesting use case and I still think there's room for improvement but in terms of spreading the bets and just the need to start something totally new I am a bit confused that you do the same thing over and over again (and I didn't see any disruptive feature or new angle with Posthaven).
The only exchange I've had with one of the founders (Garry) was on Twitter when a YC company named SnapJoy launched a campaign to "free your photos" from Flickr.
The only problem was that SnapJoy was a bigger black hole than Flickr was. An API to access your photos was coming soon for months and never came before they were acquired by Dropbox.
Somehow he was arguing around that point. Unsure how but it couldn't possibly have made sense.
I have nothing against Garry or anyone else involved in these projects/companies but it goes a long way to hurt those of us [1] trying to build software where users actually control and retain ownership of their data.
the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service
Seriously? Just gonna throw 'em under the bus like that? Friends like these..
Its time to stop trotting out this meme that the alternative to an "aquihire" was a sustainable business. Sometimes you've got to fish or cut bait.
Ad hominem aside, trust should never be required for a good agreement. PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell. If they follow that up with e.g., transferring control of posthaven.com to a well-regarded foundation like Wikimedia, the EFF, or archive.org they could further remove the trust requirement from the contract they are forming with their users. That'd be great.
There's nothing wrong with selling out. I assume Posterous was founded to make a profit at some point and selling out allowed them to do that. I'm actually 100% okay with that. I was merely calling out that "never selling out" is a strange proposal coming from someone with a track record for selling out...on the day that this former sold out service announces it is shutting down forever.
It might just be bad timing to announce the next project more than anything.
WMF or EFF, I dunno, but the Internet Archive has plenty of interest in large sets of blogs (much as the Library of Congress has interest in tweets).
The nifty thing, though, is that PostHaven doesn't have to wait if they are genuine in their intent! The Internet Archive offers a paid archiving service, Archive-It...
Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you?
Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be.
#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.
#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286 can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement for nginx" kinds of problems.
#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you sell it to them?
In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.
Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that is self contained.
Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.
A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support.
Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.
A foundation is one approach, and a valid one. You might end up with something like archive.org, except with a Wayback Machine that serves up actual historical content. (This would be an interesting direction for archive.org to take their Wayback Machine, if they could get sites like Posterus to donate the domain and data at shutdown.)
Another approach is to build a service where you make no promises about hosting content forever, but find ways to ensure that users own their data, and have full freedom of migration if you should close down.
Since 2010 I've been running http://branchable.com/ , which takes this approach. The same git clone of their site that users can make to edit it contains all their data and configuration. It's built on an open engine http://ikiwiki.info/ , so users can switch away at any time, with no conversion. Ikiwiki is a static site builder, so users can host on S3 or github, or anywhere if they decide to stop using Branchable. Even the management and business logic are open software, so if we folded tomorrow and someone wanted, they could recreate us using http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/
Branchable is not designed to have a fast burn, but we've had slow and steady growth, and happy users who continue paying the bills each month.
There's a lot of room in this space for sites serving different sets of users in ways that don't turn them into extruded VC product, so welcome to it!
An interesting term to look up when considering something like this is the cost to "endow a terabyte": To ensure that it's preserved continually, paid as an up-front cost.
IIRC archive.org manages this for somewhere around $2000 per terabyte. There's a lot of interesting research into predicting how changes in drive prices etc will play out and affect this number, that you can find by googleing the term.
This is what we're building with Tent (https://tent.io). The idea is since you can always host your own Tent server, it doesn't matter if your hosting provider shuts down.
You can migrate your data to another server and change your entity (global user identifier) as part of the protocol, so there's no messy "please update your address books" (that part happens automatically.
Data is stored as posts and post types are developer extensible (posts are JSON and binary attachments), so if your favorite app is discontinued, another developer can make a great app that interacts with the same post types.
We're working on a Tent app that imports Posterous posts right now.
Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet should be.
I'll believe that once you actually have an escrow policy that e.g. ensures both source and domain names go into the trust of <public domain, non-profit org> if you sell or fold.
Until then, that pledge is just words which can be rescinded any given time.
To be very clear: I am not insinuating you would break your pledge, but as a user, I'd be unwise to trust a non-binding statement on a web page.
Why should I trust that this will last longer, given the same people are involved? The fact that you charge $5 / month? What do I get for $5 / month versus, say, my own VPS running whatever blog software I choose for the same money (or less)?
I have run many personal servers. They all come and go. They get hacked. I lose interest. The content goes away forever, except if I'm lucky enough for it to get picked up in http://archive.org. Posthaven is like that, but you don't have to hope. It will get archived.
Self-hosting is great and I don't think we'll ever replace it. But for the vast majority of personal content out there, you want a caretaker. I hope you'll think of us when you do.
Instead, though, you have to deal with moving all your content, repeatedly, as your chosen "forever" or "lifetime" company goes under, folds up, gets sold and shuttered, changes terms of use and claims rights to your content, or any of the other bad things we've all seen over the years.
Vigilance is going to be required whichever solution you choose, but having said that, a properly set up, locked down server based on a stable server-oriented OS distro, is going to require very little maintenance, if you subscribe to the old ways. Don't fix it if it isn't broken, and keep installed software to the absolute bare minimum required. Analyze upgrades to see if they're actually necessary (the answer is usually "no"). Pick your blog software carefully, from projects with proven track records for stability and security, and apply the same practices of keeping modules and add-ons down to the bare minimum, and you'll find there really is not much you have to keep up with.
Unfortunately no business regardless of the desire can guarantee it will run forever. It's not a matter of will alone. Any agreement to never sell your shares would imply that a entity structure without shares would better fit your stated motives.
Sorry, unless you either open-source all your code so anyone can pick up the pieces once you are unwilling or unable to continue or you show me the part of the business that details your contingency plan, this is just sweet talk.
>And they charge $5 per month, so
>the sustainability is more clear.
In 1996, Geocities began offering a deal: pay $4.95 a month and no ads will be shown on your site, and you get to use your own domain for your website. I signed up immediately. 3 year later, Geocities was acquired by Yahoo. 10 years later, Geocities was closed:
There is nothing really permanent about any of these services. Ma Bell may have offered a reliable phone service for almost 100 years, but in the era of the Internet the half-life of consumer sites tends to be much shorter.
Both 2 and 3 are certainly in the plans. How could we not have an API? And custom domains?
Brett and I have discussed #1 and it's an option we want to keep on the table. First priority is to build and create a great hosted experience, however.
That's good to hear. You would be surprised how many services (even new) don't have public APis. I didn't see it mentioned on the site which is why I assumed it didn't exist.
By custom domains I mean user supplied top level domains. Definitely have a read on how we view URL permanence [1]. I wish more sites thought about it and glad you already are.
Why are people so cynical? I know garry, and he is one of the most honest and generous people around. I signed up .. posterous was awesome and should live on.
From personal experience, doing a startup is so hard that judging the co-founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.
So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.
I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?
When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.
Garry, thanks for doing this new project. We need services that are sustainable long-term. We need a solid ad-free place that people can post their thoughts and have a decent chance of having them stick around as long as the web exists.
Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a return that sustains the service.
Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities, that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.
Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that might strengthen the company, not weaken it.
I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How dare they.
We just fixed a major problem with our HAProxy instance. The floodgates are open and everything is working awesome now. Please come back and give us another chance.
We had no idea when Posterous would shut down -- it's been a project Brett and I have been working on in our spare time for a while and we had to literally scramble to get this into launch-ready state.
We fixed it (in case you're wondering, make sure your HAProxy Maxconn setting is high enough, say 1024 connections, if you're serving static assets behind it in addition to dynamic content.) and we hope you'll give us one more shot.
I'm curious how you guys arrived at $5/month. Is it based more on what you expect people are willing to pay, or based more on how much you expect this to cost to operate?
It's very peculiar that the way this service is presented is the exception, while it should be the rule. Actually most businesses should try to have this in mind: provide a service that users want and are willing to pay for and try to be cheap and sustainable.
I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now optimize for VC rounds apparently.
We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.
Please bear with us though through this launch period.
Thanks. Getting an SSL connection error there, and it's actually sunny in Portland right now so I need to get outside for a run, I'll check back after.
This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?
@ScoopIt (curation) launched with a layered, freemium model that made sense, as compared to the discussions around Posterous I heard, that even non-techies asked about -- what IS the funding model for Posterous.
I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!
I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the "BackUp" button appeared.
It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about this??
What does it offer for $5 a month? Wordpress.com charges as well and the bill runs up to a lot of money for typical bells and whistles needed to run a blog. Google blogspot is still pretty much free all around. Tumblr is the same.
We think the world still needs a Posterous-like blog engine that is simpler to use for everyone else. Posterous got quite complicated after I left, and I think the world needs the simple version again quite a lot.
The world has an option to sign-up for a free blog through Google, Tumblr and even wordpress.com (though Wordpress.com's free is not free like Google/Tumblr). So what makes you think the world will sign up for $5 service?
I am not here to 'kill' those services. Previously with Posterous we were very aggressive about that. I think people should use the service that is best for them. For some it will be wordpress.com, self-hosted Wordpress, Squarespace, and others.
We're making it for ourselves. It's a long-term project. If we make good software, then it doesn't matter if there are 500 users or 5 million.
Google, Tumblr, etc. all have investors and shareholders which are trying to turn a profit. I think the idea here (and Garry can correct me if I'm wrong) is that they'll never take on outside funding or entertain selling the company, the sole purpose of the site will be to build something that is sustainable and lasting as opposed focusing on profit.
That's exactly why $5 doesn't seem like a transparent deal right now. It is also not clear who is the target audience here. The average person who would sign-up for a blog, wouldn't shell out $5 so easily, and a professional blogger would look at it suspiciously to begin with (given the extremely early stage). It would be better if that reference to $5 is clarified in-depth, or taken out altogether with a different kind of explanation.
This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.
Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.
On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.
I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.
Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No company can guarantee that, no matter how good.
A sustainable replacement already exists: statically generated website on S3. You own the domain, and there is very little chance that S3 is going away anytime soon.
1. When Garry says "forever," I think he means in comparison to the now-dead posterous; & not necessarily "forever" as in "All of God's Eternity"!
2. At least you picked a decent name, PostHaven. I always hated the name Posterous. And the brown/yellow logo. Ugh!
3. As a non-techie I would pay $60/year for 10-blogs, BUT NOT if it will be as bad as Posterous which worked like pure crap for email-posting (yet that was their big Come On!) From Summer 2009 for 6 months it worked fine, then something changed & it never worked well after that (only headlines would post with empty body content!!!) Wasted TONS of time & energy trying to get answers from them & only got the run-around. It was a miserable nightmare for 20-months when I finally bailed in Spring 2011 & went to WP.com, & that was after seeing a post at Computerworld that there was a bug between Gmail & Posterous!!! Yet Posterous didn't know that? Pfff! Wp.com works excellent for email-posting & w/Gmail/iPhone. Make it like WP.com & maybe will consider...
4. Do not make the account-email address the ONLY addy that can be email-posted FROM. Give us a "special post to" addy like WP does so we can post by email from ANY of our email addys, & not just the ONE connected to account. That was another royal PITA thing about Posterous. We should not have to add ALL of our addys as add'l "users" just to be able to post-by-email from DIFFERENT addys. I cannot even express how arse-backward-miserable that set-up was!! If PostHaven sets it up that same way, no thanks!
5. Do not have Tags in the Subject Line like Posterous did!! Did it ever occur to those guys we might send our post to Posterous & elsewhere at the same time? (such as Email Groups?) Then the other list shows the stupid Tags in the Subject Line! Bad idea!
6. Don't make the Default "Gallery" so that we have to type "NO GALLERY" in every stinking email! Or at least let US, the user, SET the DEFAULT CHOICE.
7. Let us choose AT LEAST 1-global FONT for the blog body & headlines, VERDANA, crystal clear, best READABLE font.
8. Let us choose AT LEAST 2-global Font SIZES for the blog body text & headline. NO TEENY TINY STINKING FONT SIZES!
9. Let us choose AT LEAST 3-global Font COLORS: links, headlines, body text (#000000 BLACK body TEXT >> & NO STINKING "INVISIBLE GREY" FONT ANYWHERE!!)
WP.com wants $30/YEAR for the "privilege" to change global font, font size, font colors. If it was a one-time-$30-fee, fine, but not every year (10 blogs would be $300 PER YEAR just to have a decent font!)
10. Let us choose ALL Theme COLORS, background, menu bars, Blog's Title, etc.
11. Themes: WP.com & Posterous both have & had CRAPPY UGLY themes. You can tell that it is mostly GUYS designing all the hideous themes, because women would know better! (design, colors, layout, FUNCTION), but unfortunately, we are not the tech geeks! If PostHaven themes will be as crappy, it won't be worth switching, unless total flexibility is INCLUDED (see #8-9-10 above).
--Have several "Magazine" type themes, Photoblogging themes, Portfolio themes, etc., that actually WORK with EMAIL-blogging! (Most of them DON'T, including the one Posterous had! The first photo should show up on site but they never did! -- The only WP.com "magazine" theme that works w/email-posting is Triton Lite & it has a hideous white film over it & TEEEENY TINY INVISIBLE GREY FRONT, making it a total loser of a theme).
--Or, let us dl free or paid themes from 3rd parties elsewhere to use on our blogs & you guys could forego the whole themes disasters. (WP.com has paid themes but quite pricey $75-$150, & I think you STILL have to buy the CSS Upgrade just to change fonts/sizes/colors!)
12. Let us decide WHERE we want the DAY, DATE, & TIME of each post! (At the TOP, under the Headline, NOT out to the side wasting space, NOR at the bottom of the posts! Ugh!)
13. WIDGETS! & SHORTCODES! (for archives, search, RSS Feeds, Twitter Stream, HTML-Text-&-Images boxes, videos, etc.) Frankly, I don't see why the wheel needs to be RE-invented... it must be a "guy thing." Just copy what WP.com has already invented, but add the flexibility that WP.com does not include & I would gladly give you $60/year for 10-blogs.
14. Oh, & allow users to have ADS!!! Posterous was always promising they were going to allow users to have ads, but they never did (all the while they were Vigi-linking everyone's blogs!)
15. And if being able to use our own domains is INCLUDED, that would be GREAT. WP.com wants $18/Year for that privilege (10 blogs = $180) plus annual domain fees.
16. Will PostHaven be hosting .PDFs, .MP3s, Videos, etc. like Posterous did? That was ONE good thing!
17. BUT I'm not willing to sign up in advance because there's no way to know if any of the other above miseries from prior Posterous & current WP.com will be the same at PostHaven or not. But will keep an eye out to see how it develops.
Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.
Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.