TwitPic Pulls A Facebook, Bans Posterous
Whether you love them or hate them, it looks as if Posterous has angered yet another company, albeit for the right reasons this time.
In their attempt to liberate the twitterverse from having their images permanently hosted upon TwitPic which they announced earlier today.
A picture is worth 1,000 words. Or 3 tweets, 2 blog posts and 4 status updates. Which is why it’s important to keep your photos in a place that truly belongs to you.
We’ve had numerous users ask us to help them find a new home for their photos, and today we are announcing new tools to help move your photos from TwitPic to Posterous.
With Posterous, not only can you customize the look and feel of your site, you can also manage all your comments in one place. (Official Posterous Blog)
Unlike Ning, Xanga, Vox and Tumblr who all for the most part publicly ignored Posterous’s public challenge, TwitPic fired back by blocking Posterous’s servers from importing any more images off of the once favored tweet picture site (at least it will be when news of this spreads).
According to TechCrunch, TwitPic is accusing Posterous of violating some kind of “user privacy issue” despite the fact that the import user initiated and only uses TwitPic’s RSS feed to pull the images off.
This method of blocking the opposition has been played before, most notably by Facebook a few years ago when they encountered Google’s Friend Connect and decided that they didn’t want to play fair.
Lawyers have apparently intervened on both sides, although truth be told TwitPic’s excuses are pathetic at best and extremely draconian at worst.
Hopefully TwitPic decides to do the right thing and allow users to leave the site legally (and without a hassle), as their recent move will only encourage hackers to rip images off of TwitPic’s servers (or worse, call up a lawyer and sue).
Hopefully the Posterous team pursues TwitPic about this issue, as any site that refuses to allow users to export all of their own personal data is not worth investing time and energy in.
