Twitpic is dead to me. The fact that they are shutting out developers is quite comical considering the whole reason they exist is because of the Twitter API.
It looks to me like they're shutting out competitors looking to replace their service. That's apples and oranges compared to Twitter, which they are supplementing.
If your users are moving their data over to another service, then a) it's their prerogative to do so, and b) maybe it says something about your service. "We IP block competitors" is not a bullet point in your defensibility strategy.
If your users are moving their data over to another service, then a) it's their prerogative to do so, and b) maybe it says something about your service.
No one has suggested otherwise, but you're under no requirement to help your competitors.
True, but Twitter breathes down the necks of everyone in the space of supplementing and complementing services. Twitter is looking to own the ecosystem and keep control of the user experience. One of these days Twitter will buy an image service, make it the default, and say to all the others: "oh, you can play too, but we're the default", effectively shutting others out. Just look at bit.ly and other URL shorteners and what Twitter has done.
Yes, look at what Twitter has done to shorteners, vs. bit.ly's continued business: bit.ly offers great reporting, use with services besides Twitter, and bit.ly pro to integrate your own domain. So bit.ly remains the shortener of choice for professionals.
Twitpic's solution was to block Rackspace Cloud entirely? I don't know much about their conflict with Posterous but I do know that they're taking a wholly terrible approach
Terrible Approach -> Give all Posterous import tool users goatse
Bad -> Block a whole rack space
Good -> Negotiate some sort of deal with Posterous
Better -> Let this site access the rss feed
Say I run a blog on the Rackspace Cloud, and want to use my own custom script to rip photos from my personal TwitPic account. Well, I can't because it is banned. In it's entirety.
It seems to have worked in the sense that the Posterous import tool no longer functions. It does not seem to work in the sense that they banned, albeit small, section of their user base.
What makes anyone think this stopped TwitPic from losing users to Posterous?
I would imagine any user sophisticated enough to think of moving, would have some opinions about data liberation and services that try to lock them in.
On the contrary, I would imagine this puts more users on notice that TwitPic is locking users' own data in. Such users will begin looking for other places to post pics to.
Not to mention, people may already have local copies of stuff they post of TwitPic. Blocking Posterous just means re-uploading stuff, which is a nuisance. The only person who loses here is TwitPic.
Unless you're as big as Facebook, you can't really monopolize user data.
I’m a bit a a loss as to what problem TwitPic is trying to solve. Hurt feelings?
Everyone could have told them that all this is going to get is bad press. Oh, and probably five users who won’t switch after they planned to. And another five who are so annoyed that they will.
Posterous should make a client-side proxy for pulling the feed. Just a small Java applet, or Flash or whatever (I'm not 100% sure how cross-site protection is implemented), and have users run that to down- and upload the pictures.
Once that's in place they can send an email to twitpic, telling them that they've circumvented the block, and they should feel free to unblock Rackspace.
Which begs the question why doesn't Posterous use multiple proxies from various providers. Perhaps they are now - but it seems too late for other Rackspace clients.
Embedly is an api that allows you to embed over 100 services in your site. Twitpic is just one such services, so it is probably not worth their while to make a workaround.
