I always cringe a little when I see promises like this. I'm a big fan of under-promise/over-deliver. I'd much rather see "Posterous builds Ning blog importer" rather than a promise to do so.

Do they have an agreement with Ning? Otherwise... how do you scrape Ning at scale without them figuring it out and blocking your IP addresses? Tor?

Ning gets tons of traffic. It would be awfully cruel to clamp down on a little harmless scraping.

Making it harder to move your data might encourage more people to upgrade to the premium version.

It wouldn't be very nice, though. I agree.

people will do an amazing amount of work when they feel like they are held hostage. People tend not to make the value decision like a company would.

No harm in giving people options, in a perfect world people should be able to easily move in between platforms. I know for a long time the better forum software have offered converters.

Very smart move, though I'm not sure if the demographics of ning users (As I know them) are a good fit for posterous.

I wish posterous would commit to letting me add javascript in my template.

Vultures circling or cutting out the fat? Time will tell.

Ning seems to be looking for ways to piss off its customer base.