

Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams - adrianscott
http://www.adrianscott.org/posterouss-branding-grab-a-week-after-the-aff

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alanh
Absolutely can’t stand the inexcusably large mouseover area around the yellow
"Posterous" links at the top of these blogs. That's the truly obnoxious thing
here

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rantfoil
Other themes have less obtrusive versions with transparent logos. Most people
end up leaving the basic theme because that's what simplicity is about --
reducing the number of choices. People who care a lot can change it. Most
people don't care.

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kyro
I think it's more an issue of most people don't care enough to send you a
message about it. It's still extremely annoying and frustrating, because often
times it simply won't go away, and so I have to move my cursor back and forth
a bunch of times until it decides to disappear.

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rantfoil
You're right -- I misunderstood your initial comment. I'm going to think about
this some more. Really appreciate the feedback.

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alanh
I also find the wording a bit strong, too: ”Shouldn’t you?” My snarky response
is “Only if I wanted all my content to have an obnoxious yellow thing at the
top that cheapens my personal brand.” Politely put, I find it offputting and
presumptuous. “So can you” is a similar message that’s much less aggressive.

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pavs
Wait. How was that a "scandal"?

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zaidf
Honestly I wish the title of the blog post was a link. From feedback I have
received, it is very difficult to know where to click to read the entire post.

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rantfoil
We would love to be able to put the full blog post title in there. The
Facebook Stream API limits what we can put in that space.

I think this is a good candidate for an advanced setting. For other autopost
sites we allow customization here. We'll discuss with the team.

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markkoberlein
I'm a Posterous user and I really like the service but it has been interesting
to watch the moves they have made lately since Tumblr has been getting a lot
of positive press.

I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to
increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in
order to compete with Tumblr.

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rantfoil
This was literally a bug fix due to user complaint about blog name truncation.
There is no conspiracy here.

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vincentchu
It's not really a branding grab. The reason is pretty simple. We were
contacted by Facebook because our stream stories were in violation of their
terms of service, which forbid "Calls to action" in the body of the stream
story. For instance, take a look at the old style stories we used to publish:

<http://skitch.com/vincentchu/dne9u/facebook-vincent-chu>

In this example, the "Read more on postmodern babbler" text was in violation
and we were asked to remove it. So we did. But I still wanted people to have a
"Read more" call to action somewhere, so I put it in the "Action links" area.
Unfortunately that field is only 25 characters long. We've found that most
people's blog titles will _not_ fit into 25 characters. In fact, we've seen
blogs where truncating the action link after 25 characters leads to some
unfortunate text. For instance:

"Read more on Vince's Analytics Site" would become "Read more on Vince's Anal"

So in the interest of not creating bad looking text, we changed the text

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kyro
As icey said in a comment on the blog post, you could probably fix that with
"Read more on Vince's A..."

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novas0x2a
That doesn't really solve the problem: "Bob's Assault on Stupidity" becomes
"Read more on Bob's Ass..."

Arbitrary truncation of English text is guaranteed to result in amusing edge
cases. Besides, how often does a blog title fit into 25 - len("Read more on ")
- len("...") = 9 characters? I couldn't even find a posterous that wouldn't
truncate under that rule. Truncation is ugly- it should be a worst-case
exception, not something applied to every single post.

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Terretta
I think kyro's point is: if you're going to truncate a word, truncate
following the initial letter, then you can't possibly form an undesired word.

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adrianscott
FYI, the title of this link was changed by HN. The new title does not reflect
the point that not only were the site names removed, but that the Posterous
brand was used in place of them -- even though the link can go to a domain
name other than posterous, for blogs using domain name mapping.

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aresant
Such a great opportunity for a founder's blog to step up and say, hey we're a
maturing business, here's this new setting, here's how to opt-out if you don't
like it.

Gives them 95% of the value and 0% of the internets coming down on them.

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natrius
If you add a setting every time someone throws a hissy fit, you're going to
have a lot of settings.

