Posterous Offers LiveJournal Migration to All Those Users Still Sticking to the Dinosaur

As some of you may have heard already, Posterous is currently having a switching campaign offering one new tool to migrate from other platforms and services a day for 15 days starting on the 21^st of June. Posterous, which positions itself as ‘the simplest publishing platform on the planet’, is aggressively adding a ton of new services for new and existing Posterous users to be able to move their current blogs to this platform easily – and to stay there, of course. Today is the day of LiveJournal and I really think that people who get a chance to migrate should do so for a ton of reasons in LiveJournal as a blogging platform. Though unfortunately I still believe that people in Russia where I happen to live and where LiveJournal is kind of a religion in itself will hardly be motivated to switch anyway no matter how easy it is to post all types of content to Posterous using nothing but an email.

Now I know that LiveJournal was the first blogging platform ever but progress is progress – and unfortunately this is exactly where LiveJournal demonstrates serious deficiencies. We have not seen it actually coping in making their service competitive with more recent players in the field – so it is no wonder that if you live in the US, you hardly know anyone who still blogs on LiveJournal.

But things are very different in Russia (the only country where LiveJournal is actually the leading blogging platform; LiveJournal is now actually owned by a Russian company as Russians could not resist the influence): here people considering starting a blog head directly to LiveJournal because this is where all the blogging takes place. In fact, everyone including president Medvedev has a blog on LiveJournal. Larger blogs (those that have more than a thousand subscribers) are well-known and are frequently quoted in the media while their authors are approached by all the companies willing to get some social media presence in hopes of a mention just about anywhere – good or bad does not matter because popularity it is anyway.

Posterous has been letting users migrate from other blogging platform (and received tons of attention when Steve Rubel himself declared he was moving his blogging activities entirely to Posterous). The platforms that are currently supported are numerous and include Vox, Xanga, Ning and even their competitor Tumblr.

LiveJournal that is added today is the next blogging platform in this marathon and now LiveJournal users can move their blogs to Posterous as well: after authentication of content ownership Posterous copies the content from a LiveJournal blog (of course the latter remains intact though of course anyone actually switching should avoid duplicate content and remove the content from one of the blogs). Posts from LiveJournal can be moved to a new or existing Posterous blog. Unfortunately comments from LiveJournal will remain on LiveJournal only as it does not offer them in RSS feeds so importing them is technically impossible (which is a frequent disadvantage when blogs are migrated).

Honestly, whenever I decide to update my blog on LiveJournal (and I do have one – all the Russians do so I eventually decided I needed one as well), I find it terrifying as someone who has been blogging heavily for the last few years that I invariable spend quite some time figuring out exactly where I should click to be able to post something – and usability of LiveJournal is just beyond my understanding. So as a strong believer in simplicity in everything I think that everyone who sticks to LiveJournal should think again.

Though unfortunately I would not expect Posterous to get tons of blogs migrated by Russian users (and LiveJournal does not have any comparable popularity elsewhere in this world) because it could only happen if everyone decided to migrate right away so that moving a blog lets you stick with your old circle of friends and casual readers – instead of having to build everything from scratch. And unfortunately this value of LiveJournal – the community – will most certainly stay on LiveJournal unless Russian users suddenly decide on some flash mob and all move together today or tomorrow which will be a serious crash test for Rackspace Cloud that Posterous is powered by.

And the irony is that Posterous is actually perfect for the blogging style mostly practiced by Russian users of LiveJournal – casual diary-type blogging where people share just about everything about their lives (professional and personal alike) in one place where friends, colleagues or complete strangers can follow them. The simple blogging trend represented by Posterous as I understand it is exactly about that: easily sharing everything you feel like sharing in a comfortable environment and effortlessly. Yet Posterous may be too simple for someone who still thinks that blogging should be done the LiveJournal way and posting a single post should involve a ton of steps.

All in all, while I don’t think there’s a huge growth opportunity for Posterous out of this LiveJournal import tool because everyone who wanted to stop blogging on LiveJournal probably did so ages go, the initiative is good anyway as users of the ancient blogging platform should not be ignored. First of all, I suspect that among current Posterous users there may be plenty of those with abandoned blogs on LiveJournal – and they will be inclined to import them in order to completely forget what LiveJournal is. These users are good for Posterous at least because they will add content – and content means traffic even if it’s pretty outdated. Besides, since Russians are so unpredictable, there’s always an opportunity of a Russian LiveJournal exodus flash mob – and while this is more of a science fiction, let me hope that LiveJournal will not always stay the king in my home country because this simply does not seem to be fair.