a4agarwal

outselling your competition is one way to define success (admittedly, a huge way).

But another important factor is to follow your heart, have a vision, build what you want to build.

The most successful companies (Apple, Zappos, Amazon, Google) have strong founders/leaders with strong visions for what they want to build.

Those companies could easily pivot and make more money if they wanted to

those are examples, not absolutes. You can't spend your whole life using commodity products and then think you can build a better one by adding a feature.

Audi and VW are essentially the same company. Have you driven an Audi? The polish and finish on that car is incredible.

My dad owns two Lexus's. I've driven them extensively. I agree the attention to detail and quality are high. In my opinion, Lexus does fall into the "great experience" category. I guess your "german cars suck" comment got me riled up.

Windows 7 is modeled after OS X. Android was modeled after the iPhone. If you are designing a new product, you have to go out and see what's out there and learn from it.

Someone who has never used one of these high end products simply doesn't know.

It I started a blogging platform today, and all I had ever used was Xanga, I would probably build something 10% better than Xanga. And it would suck.

The exact quote was, "Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be"

I never said that you can't use Windows, an Android, or drive another car. But at some point you need to use the top end product to really appreciate what's out there. If you spend your whole life on Windows/BlackBerry/Toyota, you might not understand what a great product is.

Before the iPhone came out, no one knew how great a phone could be. Even I didn't. The iPhone made me understand how you can take an existing feature set, and dramatically change a product through the experience.

You're going with a blanket, "German cars suck"? Really? I'd bet German cars have more fanatics than Japanese cars do. German cars delight people.

Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car. To me, a Lexus is just a high end Honda. It gets me from point A to point B, with a bit more luxury. One of Lexus's problems is that they don't have a vision, a passion. They just pump out what people will buy:

http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-...

And yes, BMW sucks at interface design. Where they excel is in building the ultimate driving machine. I'm all for BMW outsourcing their tech:

http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-...

Maybe Windows 7 is better than OS X. But to get there, I'm sure the Windows team used OS X extensively to see what it does well, what it does poorly.

Someone who hasn't even tried the best has no way to build something better.

For the record, original author is not allowing my comment on his blog (identical to comment above).

And he has approved a comment that was entered after mine.

by that logic, i could get away with not paying my credit card bill by simply not paying it.

"If the best practice for a merchant is to suspend an account when someone doesn't pay"

no it's not!!!

i prefer that my credit card stays active if i'm late. I prefer that my health care is active if my payment is late. I love that my cell phone is reachable if i miss my bill.

Stop making excuses. 99.9% of the time, i don't want the merchant to cancel services if i miss a payment.

Simply stopping payment is a bullshit way to indicate you want to stop paying for a service.

This is hacker news. Thing about building a system where you had to account for people breaking a contract every time they wanted to cancel service. That's an edge case and shouldn't be encouraged.

you can make your own assumptions about acceptable ways of canceling a monthly service. you can also read the terms of service and abide by what you said ok to.

personally, it seems like a lot of people are trying to whine their way out of contracts.

This doesn't seem so terrible to me. You entered a contract with Zipcar where you pay them an annual fee for their services. Failing to pay the fee doesn't automatically break that contract.

Think of this way: what if you could simply stop paying rent when you want to move out of an apartment? Or you just stopped paying your cell phone bill when you want to cancel it? What if you forgot to pay your health care premium and you lost your health insurance??

Clearly these aren't acceptable ways to break out of a contract.

The author's trick to "lose" your card to prevent auto billing is inviting issues like this. It seems so much smarter to just check your credit card statement each month. That would be much less work than having to update your credit card number everywhere you do want to renew a service.

Your credit card failed processing and Zipcar kept your service up and prompted you to update the card. That seems like a great way to go. If they had simply cancelled your account, I could imagine this blog post going the other way. "I forgot to update my card and zipcar cancelled my account, leaving me stranded when I really needed a car!!"

With critical accounts like your car, apartment, cell phone... it seems best to be explicit when you want to cancel your account.

"You can't say that coding in objective-c is as enjoyable as coding in ruby"

Really? I thought I was allowed to voice my opinions on my blog.

Can you call something "trolling" if it's on your own blog?

Maybe there needs to be "Rails gems app store" where we only allow gems that have gone through an approval process :).

(j/k :) )

Thank you, I agree 100% and this is basically the gist of my post.

That's why there is so much fragmentation in ruby gems. When one gem fails to do something, a developer thinks, "well I can just do this myself and do it better!"

And do you end up with 10 gems that all do roughly the same thing, but not perfectly, each designed by and for a different person.

Mark, in no way did i trash on the Rails framework. I basically said that I find 3rd party frameworks to be less reliable than I have seen on other platforms. I also said that being on Rails has still helped Posterous tremendously and I'm appreciative of that.

Seems like you're trying to pick a fight here.

The funny thing here is that I'm Garry's cofounder, and I don't live in any of the neighborhoods he recommends. Maybe he's trying to tell me to move :)

When Garry and I moved to SF to start Posterous, we moved to SOMA since apartments are abundant and it's startup central. But I found little value in being near other companies. What I did find was a lack of food and culture.

Posterous first got offices in North Beach. I really LOVE North Beach. There's amazing food and it's a beautiful part of town. Plus Jam Legend is there.

+1 for the Mission. We love our new offices. Much cheaper than anywhere else in the city, most people can walk to bike to work, tons of great food, near Bart. We couldn't ask for much more.

However, one point of disagreement with Garry's map: you can't simply write off everything north of Market. Sometimes it seems like people south of market (SOMA and Mission) don't cross north as much as they should. There's a lot of city up there!

San Francisco is one of the greatest cities in the world. If you decide to base your company here, don't optimize to be close to Twitter. Optimize to be in a vibrant neighborhood with great food and great culture.

Believe me, even north of market, you will have no problem immersing yourself in startup culture and surrounding yourself with more tech entrepreneurs than you can handle.

On the internet, there are few barriers to entry. It's incredibly cheap and easy to build most startups these days. That's not where the value is. The value is that you think you can do it bigger and better than anyone else.

Except for maybe Google search, I can't think of a product that I couldn't build tomorrow if i wanted to enter that space.

while i agree you can raise money with no beer drinking and pure mechanics, my whole point is you're optimizing for the money and not the person.

for me, grabbing dinner with investors, getting to know them, getting them to know me, is much more important. So i want to have as much contact with the investors as possible.

They aren't just money. You will be working with them closely for years.

thanks! well said.

Ok here you go:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/posterous-importer/

There's information and a direct link to a plugin that lets you export your site out of Posterous to Wordpress.

We think we're a better service than they are, but we aren't afraid of data portability. Users can switch as much as they want and choose the best service

and what will a normal user do with that text file?

We find it much more effective to have an API that other people (like you) can use to write an exporter to whatever other service they wish.

Maybe you should just write a Posterous exporter using our API, instead of complaining. Just let me know if you need any help!

thanks

techtruth, we do offer your data in standard formats: XML through our API. See:

http://posterous.com/api/reading

What exactly are you looking for? We're open to suggestions and will gladly expand our API to keep Posterous open and flexible.

There's no hypocrisy here. Our goal is to let users move into and out of posterous at will, and use whatever service they find to be best.

Thanks!

1. I hope we add this soon

2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because

i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy

ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here

iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google

If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't.

There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move.

Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers.

Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.

I wouldn't even call them "Tumblr themes." These were just blog themes, owned by a third party, who licensed them to us for use on Posterous. They just happened to be on Tumblr first, but don't have any other affiliation to that service.

Hey guys. I'm the cofounder of Posterous.

Yes, someone did figure out how to post to Dustin's site today. This security hole is now fixed.

We had a specific problem with the way we dealt with SPF records. Dustin didn't set any up, and there was a specific way that Robin Duckett's email server responded that caused us to flag it as a false negative for spoofing.

For the vast majority of users who use gmail, hotmail or other services, this was never an issue.

Since our launch on day one, we have taken email spoof detection very seriously. It's one of our core differentiators: to be able to securely post to your blog by emailing a single, easy to remember address. We don't want to do secret addresses or secret words.

Over the past 2 years, we've developed robust spoof detection ip and spend a ton of time trying to stay a step ahead of hackers. Fortunately, we've only had a few very specific, isolated cases where one of our sites was spoofed and each time we have improved our system.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We always need to be one step ahead of the hackers/spoofers, and we thank the Hacker News community for keeping us on our toes!

Hey guys. I'm the cofounder of Posterous.

Yes, someone did figure out how to post to Dustin's site today. This security hole is now fixed.

We had a specific problem with the way we dealt with SPF records. Dustin didn't set any up, and there was a specific way that Robin Duckett's email server responded that caused us to flag it as a false negative for spoofing.

For the vast majority of users who use gmail, hotmail or other services, this was never an issue.

Since our launch on day one, we have taken email spoof detection very seriously. It's one of our core differentiators: to be able to securely post to your blog by emailing a single, easy to remember address. We don't want to do secret addresses or secret words.

Over the past 2 years, we've developed robust spoof detection ip and spend a ton of time trying to stay a step ahead of hackers. Fortunately, we've only had a few very specific, isolated cases where one of our sites was spoofed and each time we have improved our system.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We always need to be one step ahead of the hackers/spoofers, and we thank the Hacker News community for keeping us on our toes!

Hey guys. I'm the cofounder of Posterous.

Yes, someone did figure out how to post to Dustin's site today. This security hole is now fixed.

We had a specific problem with the way we dealt with SPF records. Dustin didn't set any up, and there was a specific way that Robin Duckett's email server responded that caused us to flag it as a false negative for spoofing.

For the vast majority of users who use gmail, hotmail or other services, this was never an issue.

Since our launch on day one, we have taken email spoof detection very seriously. It's one of our core differentiators: to be able to securely post to your blog by emailing a single, easy to remember address. We don't want to do secret addresses or secret words.

Over the past 2 years, we've developed robust spoof detection ip and spend a ton of time trying to stay a step ahead of hackers. Fortunately, we've only had a few very specific, isolated cases where one of our sites was spoofed and each time we have improved our system.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We always need to be one step ahead of the hackers/spoofers, and we thank the Hacker News community for keeping us on our toes!

Hey guys. I'm the cofounder of Posterous.

We have looked into this issue and have confirmed this is not a security hole. No personal information is revealed to users other than through obscure links that are only available to the true site owner.

This url is only available:

1. In the emails we send to users to claim their site. So only the true owner receives these 2. On the Posterous site itself but only when we know it's the site owner (based on cookies and other tests)

That Google search does include a bunch of unclaimed sites. However, none of those sites will include the secret hash, and therefore none will expose the email address.

The fact that we include the email address in the form is definitely odd, and we're removing that now. But nonetheless, it's only visible to the person who created that site, behind obscure URLs.

We're very confident in the system we have built. While making things super simple for the common user, we never forget that our users care a lot about keeping their information secure.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We always need to be one step ahead of the hackers/spoofers, and we thank the Hacker News community for keeping us on our toes!

I agree, and it will do that eventually. They are making it an open standard so it can be integrated into other devices. And i'm confident the 3G limitation is temporary

Actually, Posterous has a web editor that's super powerful and easy to use. You can post all content including media without using email if you want

Google is indexing Facebook's "Opt out of emails from Facebook" page for email addresses that were submitted using the "Find a friend" feature.

I checked out the Google site and saw a few addresses in the format name.secret@blogger.com, which indicates these are the SECRET email addresses people use to post to their blogger sites. Pretty bad.