Hi folks, ever lose the data on your hard drive and have that, "Oh nooooo!" feeling. Well TypePad, my blog providing service delivers that same feeling. Over the last 4 years, I have written and created hundreds of posts with images, files and multi-media. My blog is now here.
My blog is pure unabashed digital narcissism with typos and bad grammar thrown in at no extra charge. Well I have decided to move my blog to Wordpress as it lets me keep and control my data. As it stands now my old images and files are mostly trapped within TypePad and SixAparts servers. I can pay a few hundred bucks to have someone extract and install them for me elsewhere, but I don't think that is worthwhile at this point. So SixApart via TypePad, will extract another $50 from me.
SixApart, the company that offers TypePad, doesn't offer a full data export of your TypePad blog. This is most likely a half assed strategy at client retention. It worked, I am retained and renewing for another year, with my new blog pointing to your servers to pull out my old images.
My only hope is that a few people considering TypePad as new customers will avoid it like the plague. Typepad and SixApart represent the old world of keeping control of users data with a, "we can get away with it, so why not." mentality which I can in no way support.
Keeping customers by locking them in is evil. You will find that if you have to do that to protect your business, you don't really have a business, you are milking a dead cash cow, good luck with that folks.
To the folks at TypePad: a few years ago I met your management's Sr. team Andrew Anker and have followed Anil Dash's blog. Mena Trott seems smart and cool. You seemed like real nice folks, but have become evil, so I am out of here. I have run a software firm and was responsible for 30 people and know it is hard but if you can't do the right thing, you should probably be doing something else for living.
For those wishing to follow Designing Better Futures go here www.gogerty.com RSS FEED where I will be posting new typos and fresh grammatical horrors in a more open environment.
