Exhibit A on why I want to control as much as possible when it comes to web services: Posterous is Joining the Flock at Twitter

I used to use Posterous as my main blogging tool, primarily because it was so great at distributing content to the latest social media services. (My relatives are hip to different things, so I have to do the scatter shot.) I was always uncomfortable with that since Posterous had no clear means of generating revenue and could disappear at any time.

Now Twitter has acquired them and they could easily go the way of Gowalla and disappear with little notice. I’m much happier being in control of my own destiny and feeling relatively confident that the things I publish now (like this blog entry) will not go away unless I want them to. Even if it is more work.

For the same reason, I collect my tweets on this site. I’m not particularly thrilled with having them integrated here, but this way I solve two problems:

• If Twitter should ever shuffle off, I’ve got a record of all that I wrote there (at least since I started collecting them).
• There are those who have some interest in what I post to Twitter, but they’re not Twitter users.

Facebook? I never post directly on Facebook. Bleh.