service

Posterous Shutting Down On April 30th

The Posterous blogging platform will be shutting down on April 30th 2013. Since being acquired (or acqu-hired) by Twitter in March 2012, there have been few feature updates to the service.
On February 15th 2013 Sachin Agarwal, founder and CEO of Posterous, published a page linked to from the landing page with the announcement and instructions on how to export data from the service. The announcement itself follows.

Posterous will turn off on April 30
Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.
On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents. 

Here are the steps:

Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.
When your backup is ready, you'll receive an email.
Return to http://posterous.com/#backup to download a .zip file.
If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30.

We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter. Thank you.

Sachin Agarwal
Founder and CEO
So there goes another social media service. Tumblr seems to have won this section of the market, and definitely seems to have more traction.

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below. Here's a link to my practically unused Posterous space too. 

Hotmail is dead! Long "Live" Outlook

So, last week Microsoft launched Outlook.com, a refresh/relaunch of their webmail service. Outlook.com replaces existing Hotmail and Live user interface, beefs up the service and even gives users the opportunity to change their email domain from Hotmail.com to Outlook.com.
I've been using Outlook.com both through a new email address and with my existing Live account, so here are my impressions almost a week in.

The user interface, once you have either signed up or agreed to have your existing Hotmail/Live use the new UI, is clean. At launch, everyone was referring to the UI as the Metro one.

Metro UI is the design language/style used by Microsoft for their smartphones (running Windows Phone), the Xbox dashboard and on Windows 8. Later in the week, news broke of the fact that Microsoft staff and partners have been explicitly told not to use the term Metro UI, due to threat of legal action from Metro AG, a German retail group. Until Microsoft come up with a replacement name for their UI, I'll call it Metro UI.
My Winodows 8 Start screen. I call it Metro UI.
The clean UI on Outlook.com is a definitely better. The larger, more readable fonts and cleaner screen seem to be snappier than the now clunky Hotmail webmail. Media, such as images and video, can be set to open automatically within the email itself and images can also be viewed as a slideshow too.
An email with an image as an attachment.
A gallery view of the image attachments.
From the Outlook.com webmail page you can also chat with your MSN/Windows Live chat buddies, integrate your Facebook chat and soon you will be able to make and receive Skype voice and video calls. I'm looking forward to seeing how the Skype from Outlook.com compares to Google Talk from Gmail.
I have refrained from transferring my Live account over to the Outlook.com domain because of all the other services tied to my Live email address, mainly Xbox Live and my Windows Phone Nokia Lumia. Apparently switching your address to an Outlook.com one can break those services and accounts.

Outlook.com is obviously not finished yet. Clicking on the logo in the top left corner of the page, you get to switch from your webmail to other services such as People (contacts), Calendar and Skydrive. People is using the Metro UI design language, but Calendar and Skydrive are still using the old Hotmail/Live UI. I look forward to seeing how those services behave using the Metro UI.
Metro UI switcher to the other account services.
My Outlook.com email address synchronises perfectly with my Nokia Lumia 710, and it is as good an experience on the Windows Phone platform as Hotmail was. Essentially, nothing is new there. On Android, you can add an Outlook.com email account to the Hotmail application and get your email on the go there. My personal view on the Hotmail for Android app: it's pants, don't bother trying!

This Outlook.com webmail refresh is a good start for Microsoft, I like the shinily simple UI and service. Is it enough to win me over? Currently I'm locked into Google's services and webmail service, GMail, so it will be tough for Microsoft to do so. Check back in a few months time and see if I have changed...

These are the views of an Android fanboy, bear that in mind. As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below.

Farewell Google Wave!

This morning I received a sad email from Google which outlined the closure dates for Google Wave.

Waves will all be switched to read-only on January 31st 2012. Wave services from Google will be switched off on April 30th 2012.


Here's the complete email I received:

Dear Wavers,
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.
If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project calledWalkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.
For more details, please see our help center.
Yours sincerely,
The Wave Team
It is sad for me to see the service Wave off into the sunset (pun intended). I'm sure Gina Trapani, author of the now freely available book The Complete Guide To Google Wave, has already come to terms with this.

Farewell Google Wave, best of luck in your new incarnation as Apache Wave.

You can still read Gina Trapani and Adam Pash's The Complete Guide To Google Wave here.

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below.