[a4agarwal]

1. I hope we add this soon

2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because

i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy

ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here

iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google

If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't.

There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move.

Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers.

Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.

[jeff18]

> Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue:

a) You will lose all of your page rank

b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link

Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to play down their concern?

[Tichy]

Just support moving the URLs. Not that big of a deal.

Posted from my MacBook

[ydant]

Switching URLs is nothing like switching shortcuts. The impact is one person on switching keyboard shortcuts, but if I switch around URLs I'm impacting hundreds (or thousands).

I'm no "pro blogger" by any means, but I have a couple of posts (that were migrated from stand-alone pages) that get a decent amount of traffic. A large portion of that traffic is from forums, other blog posts, and the like. Not from "Google juice". To change that URL means I'd have to contact all of those people - hardly workable.

I don't really care about the page rank, but I have content people find useful and I want them to continue to be able to find it.

[TrevorBurnham]

Just to add my voice to the chorus: I'm tired of maintaining my personal WordPress blog and worrying about the latest security issues. Posterous now has all the features I need. But I don't want to break every link to my posts.

If you have other priorities, that's cool; just know that this is a feature that's definitely going to bring you more users.

[RyanMcGreal]

It's great that you offer easy importing of existing blogs - but if you're going to do it, you need to do it the right way. That means supporting existing URLs. Breaking URLs every time a site changes its underlying codebase breaks the web of links.