Posterous, the nimble blogging service that is similar (albeit more advanced) than Tumblr, has decided to help liberate users from dying platforms by offering to import their sites for free.
A lot of you have asked for help moving your old blog, photos or videos to Posterous. You grouched about dying platforms that haven’t added new features in ages, sites that have made it too complex to perform the most basic tasks and places that smother your content in ads.
We hear you. Every day for the next 15 days, we’ll add a new platform from which you can import your old content into Posterous. Whatever the reason, whatever the site, we want you to switch to Posterous. (Official Posterous Blog)
Ironically the first site Posterous decided to attack was Ning, who caused a firestorm after shutting down their free service.
While it’s good to see Posterous offering more tools to import media from other services, they may want to rethink their strategy of “attack thy neighbor.”
Apples Vs Oranges?
Although Ning does offer a blog service, the site is geared more towards users desiring to create their own personal social networks and not merely a weblog service.
Unless Posterous has plans on creating “dead simple forums” for their users, most Ning user will view Posterous as “too basic” and may opt to switch to WordPress instead thanks to BuddyPress.
Size Does Matter
While Posterous has received a lot of media attention and fan fare, “it’s bark is still bigger than it’s bite” as these stats from Compete.com show.
Currently Ning dwarfs Posterous in size, and their lack of response upon their may indicate that they do not see Posterous as a viable threat.
Posterous may have more success going after Xanga, which Posterous is poised to eclipse by the end of this year.
Replacement Theory Anyone?
Even though Posterous’s “email everything” makes the site useful for bloggers lacking a smartphone, users migrating from previous services may not appreciate Posterous’s lack of advanced features (such as image alignment, advertising, etc.).
While Posterous is a tool every blogger should checkout for themselves, right now the service is more of a supplement to its rivals, rather than a decent replacement.
What Should Posterous Do?
Instead of going after unrelated networks like Ning or even larger blog platforms, Posterous should focus on real dying sites (like Windows Live Spaces), as the gain there may be greater than attacking a thriving community such as Ning.
