Downloader: TwitPic, butthurt and pathetic, brings in the lawyers to fight Posterous

Saturday, July 24, 2010

TwitPic, butthurt and pathetic, brings in the lawyers to fight Posterous

Posterous, as I'm sure you're all aware, is the supremo light-weight blogging platform. Not only is it fantastically easy to use, but it's also the king of flexibility and interoperability -- you can post to your blog via email, bookmarklet, mobile phone and even Twitter! It also has the ability to import from other platforms: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and switch from many others -- but yesterday Posterous enabled Twitpic importing. Most of us hardly batted an eyelid -- it's neat, certainly, but hardly a killer feature.

TwitPic on the other hand figured that RSS scraping was enough to land Posterous a letter from its lawyers and a threat to sue. Within hours of the TwitPic importer tool going live, Posterous' servers had been banned by TwitPic. According to TechCrunch, TwitPic says they're 'not going to stop users from exporting data', but would 'prefer users to do so manually.' Awww.

Now, rest assured, this won't go any further than limp-wristed prepubescent punches, but I bet the folks at Posterous have huge grins on their faces right now. TwitPic on the other hand won't have to bother cooking breakfast this morning: it can just scrape that delicious butthurt egg from its face and chew on that instead.