An Open Letter to TwitPic
blog.embed.ly
blog.embed.ly
No one has suggested otherwise, but you're under no requirement to help your competitors.
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.
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.
From 99% of users' perspective: blocking rackspace has no effect on them unless they try to switch to posterous.
You are one of a handful of users running something else on rackspace for personal use. Sure for 5 users this was a bad approach.
From twitpic's persepective: it stopped them from losing users to posterous. Win.
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.
Unless you're as big as Facebook, you can't really monopolize user data.
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.
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.
Looks pretty sweet!