An Open Letter to TwitPic

http://blog.embed.ly/an-open-letter-to-twitpic

by screeley • 16 years ago

83 27 16 years ago

blog.embed.ly

tptacek• 16 years ago

What's the Posterous/TwitPic drama?

protomyth• 16 years ago

The link is in the open letter: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/29/twitpic-posterous-lawyers/

logic• 16 years ago

Well, that explains why I haven't been able to reach TwitPic via my Slicehost-hosted proxy.

mrtron3• 16 years ago

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.

drgath• 16 years ago

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.

Cabal2• 16 years ago

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.

cheald• 16 years ago

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.

joelhaasnoot• 16 years ago

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.

jscore• 16 years ago

haha, very true and ironic.

ericz• 16 years ago

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

mrtron3• 16 years ago

Why is that a terrible approach? It seems to have worked.

If a wound is bleeding profusely - you put a cloth on it. Sure it doesn't heal you, but it is hardly a terrible approach.

woodall• 16 years ago

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.

ugh• 16 years ago

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.

datums• 16 years ago

Why not implement a workaround (plan b), while you work on getting de-listed ?

pwim• 16 years ago

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.

mseebach3• 16 years ago

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.

bradgessler• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure this could be implemented with JavaScript.

mseebach3• 16 years ago

For the RSS, yes, but I don't think JS can download and then upload an image.

screeley• 16 years ago

All better. TwitPic made changes to whitelist Embedly. http://blog.embed.ly/twitpic

An Open Letter to TwitPic

Related Stories