Back in July, I had just about hit the absolute limit on the amount of fawning over the Posterous platform I could take, from the likes of Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble and Wayne Sutton. All of them indicated that they were “platforms of the future,” and Steve Rubel even said that it, as a lifestreaming platform, was the natural successor to Friendfeed.

Of course, since it’s a blogging platform and bears almost nothing in common with your typical lifestreaming platform, that’s a ludicrous label to put onto the service, but since Steve Rubel has a very loud megaphone, people have all but forgotten the original definitions of the term lifesteraming and have adopted his.  As someone who was on the forefront of lifestreaming as an early adopter and developer, this irritates me to no end.  But I continue to let it slide.

Why did this, as a topic, crop up for me this weekend? I’ll get back to the Posterous side of things in just a second, and it’ll become clear.

Third Party Commenting is Still Fairly Locked Away

For the past ten years, I’ve run my personal blog on a homebrew CMS that’s, at its core, had the Blogger CMS powering the posting of the actual files.  I’ve always loved the Blogger platform because it’s incredibly easy to template for, all the files are completely portable, and it’s always been easy to to export my posts from it, even before they had the migration toolset (can you write an XML template? Use that for your blog template, and you can export).

Blogger, though, is ultimately very limited in what you can do with it, and over the last several years, I’ve become more and more familiar with and happy with the WordPress platform.  While my custom coding job on my personal blog was far too complicated to easily migrate over to WordPress, several months ago I decided to take a whack at it and move over to our WordPress-based CMS here at SiliconANGLE.

Here’s my big problem – I used Disqus for my commenting solution.  Since none of the third-party commenting solutions do a very good job at (or even attempt to) synchronize comments with Blogger’s commenting system, when I try to export my posts, I lose all the conversation on my blog.

But Disqus, just like JS-Kit, Intense Debate and all the others have an open API, right?  Dataportability shouldn’t be a big deal.

Wrong.

Here’s what I’m left with after trying to leave Disqus – a stupid XML file that NOBODY wants.

WordPress won’t import this XML file. JS-Kit wants nothing to do with it. Intense Debate doesn’t even know how to import anything, let alone an XML file.

There are no workarounds to this – I can’t even re-import this XML file back into Disqus after modifying the URL structure to match the new blog.

Nothing.

In essence, everyone’s claims of dataportability are about as valid as the claims of that wonderful bluescreen commercial product you see the hucksters pitching at 3 AM on cable TV.

Which brings me back to Posterous…

As I was wondering about how this migration would all work despite the insurmountable issues with migrating the best parts of my blog – the conversation – I thought back to the conversation I had with Sachin Agarwal here at SiliconANGLE, as he defended Posterous as an open and easily exportable blogging platform of the future.

In his words:

“The API has full export that lets you get your data out. We would never lock you in: http://posterous.com/api.”

I took a look at his API this weekend, just to get an idea of what it would take to export my data, should I decide to do so.

Contrary to what Sachin claims, there is no export function, and the read API has a limitation of 50, so if you have more than 50 posts in your Posterous blog, then you’re stuck with them.  You’re never leaving.  You can’t even do what you can do with blogger, which is to create a custom XML template and scrape your archives.

[Update: It was pointed out to me on the Hacker News thread on this topic that the “page” option would allow you to get chunks of posts in groups of up to 50, and that this was a common way of doing things in a search API.  The documentation on the API is so scant that I didn’t realize this until my error was pointed out. 

Sachin defends his service Posterous because non-geeks can do everything with it without knowing how to walk and chew bubblegum.

I can’t name five members of my immediate or extended family that has a lot of experience using a search based API. Heck, I’m a coder, and I don’t have that much experience using a search based API.

I code when I hafta, and I don’t want to write a whole set of libraries just to export my data. Creating artificial barriers to the exit door is the exact opposite of the spirit of Data Portability.

Edit: Incidentally, it isn’t that I didn’t read the API that thoroughly, it’s that the API isn’t that well documented. Pretty much what is screenshotted is what exists. It’s not very well explained. –mrh]

It’s Time to Nut Up or Shut Up

Chris Saad and I talked about dataportability back in 2007, whenever it first started becoming just a germ of an idea on his drawing board (he had sent me some very early sketches of org structure and proposed standards).  Very quickly, like wildfire even, the idea spread across the tech world, and everyone from Google to Facebook to every single little Web2 company signed up to be part of this movement.

Still, all we have are a bunch of useless export and import features from everyone on down. You can’t export your Twitter history or your friends list to anything remotely useful anywhere else.  Facebook is still as closed off as ever. Commenting systems are just about useless unless you decide to stay with them in perpetuity.

Sure, Blogger and WordPress and the other major blog software types out there are fairly portable, thanks to an immense community of programmers that have pushed them kicking and screaming that direction – but all the new kids on the block like Tumblr and Posterous are going the exact same route, making it all but impossible to move off their services.

This is untenable.  We need to demand better.  It’s almost 2010. We’ve been demanding a federated, open and portable web for literally years now.

When can we expect it?