My_______ took this blog hostage!

MySpace removed all RSS feeds from blog pages.  They also designed their pages to only display 10 posts at a time.  These subtle and strategic measures prevent application-mediated transfer of blog posts and comments to other hosts (e.g. WordPress).  That is, I could not transfer my posts from MySpace in 10 minutes the way I could from Blogger.  Instead I had to tediously cut-and-paste the HTML of each post into WordPress one at a time–a chore that cost me at least 30 hours.  And, I still have to figure out how to move comments…

I’ve got to hand it to MySpace:  despite publishing arguably one of the worst-designed and badly-coded websites on the interwebs, removing RSS feeds from their blogs was a surprisingly cunning (and predictably proprietary) move on their part.  I didn’t think they had it in them.