Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams

http://www.adrianscott.org/posterouss-branding-grab-a-week-after-the-aff

by adrianscott • 16 years ago

18 27 16 years ago

zaidf• 16 years ago

Honestly I wish the title of the blog post was a link. From feedback I have received, it is very difficult to know where to click to read the entire post.

rantfoil4• 16 years ago

We would love to be able to put the full blog post title in there. The Facebook Stream API limits what we can put in that space.

I think this is a good candidate for an advanced setting. For other autopost sites we allow customization here. We'll discuss with the team.

alanh3• 16 years ago

Absolutely can’t stand the inexcusably large mouseover area around the yellow "Posterous" links at the top of these blogs. That's the truly obnoxious thing here

rksprst• 16 years ago

Totally agree... one thing you can do with custom themes is move that link all the way to the bottom of the page.

rantfoil4• 16 years ago

Other themes have less obtrusive versions with transparent logos. Most people end up leaving the basic theme because that's what simplicity is about -- reducing the number of choices. People who care a lot can change it. Most people don't care.

kyro2• 16 years ago

I think it's more an issue of most people don't care enough to send you a message about it. It's still extremely annoying and frustrating, because often times it simply won't go away, and so I have to move my cursor back and forth a bunch of times until it decides to disappear.

khill• 16 years ago

You can just get rid of it by editing your theme.

Terretta3• 16 years ago

Really? A while ago it would add itself back at render time even if the block is removed from your theme template.

aresant• 16 years ago

Such a great opportunity for a founder's blog to step up and say, hey we're a maturing business, here's this new setting, here's how to opt-out if you don't like it.

Gives them 95% of the value and 0% of the internets coming down on them.

natrius• 16 years ago

If you add a setting every time someone throws a hissy fit, you're going to have a lot of settings.

markkoberlein2• 16 years ago

I'm a Posterous user and I really like the service but it has been interesting to watch the moves they have made lately since Tumblr has been getting a lot of positive press.

I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in order to compete with Tumblr.

rantfoil4• 16 years ago

This was literally a bug fix due to user complaint about blog name truncation. There is no conspiracy here.

vincentchu2• 16 years ago

It's not really a branding grab. The reason is pretty simple. We were contacted by Facebook because our stream stories were in violation of their terms of service, which forbid "Calls to action" in the body of the stream story. For instance, take a look at the old style stories we used to publish:

http://skitch.com/vincentchu/dne9u/facebook-vincent-chu

In this example, the "Read more on postmodern babbler" text was in violation and we were asked to remove it. So we did. But I still wanted people to have a "Read more" call to action somewhere, so I put it in the "Action links" area. Unfortunately that field is only 25 characters long. We've found that most people's blog titles will not fit into 25 characters. In fact, we've seen blogs where truncating the action link after 25 characters leads to some unfortunate text. For instance:

"Read more on Vince's Analytics Site" would become "Read more on Vince's Anal"

So in the interest of not creating bad looking text, we changed the text

latortuga• 16 years ago

As someone who used to look favorably on Tumblr, I will never recommend or use them again after seeing their response to the Pitchfork domain situation (ref url, you'll have to dig through the comments for the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129450)

alanh3• 16 years ago

> the last post [on the previous pitchfork.tumblr.com] that had been made was on November 18, 2009, and said, “This filter is obsolete.” The post before that was from March 21.

Sounds like a non-issue

pavs• 16 years ago

Wait. How was that a "scandal"?

adrianscott2• 16 years ago

FYI, the title of this link was changed by HN. The new title does not reflect the point that not only were the site names removed, but that the Posterous brand was used in place of them -- even though the link can go to a domain name other than posterous, for blogs using domain name mapping.

Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams

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