As for the campaign as a whole, Posterous' VP of Marketing Rich Pearson says the company is "thrilled at the results."

"It's too early to gauge the long term bump, but in the short term, it's been huge," Pearson told ReadWriteWeb.

With today's import tool launch, Wordpress joins services like Flickr, Tumblr, Movable Type, Ning, SquareSpace and Blogger - all which full under Posterous' definition of a "dying platform." At the launch of the switch campaign, Posterous used the phrase to openly call out its competition - an action that some saw as a misstep and a gross overstatement.

The debate was heated even further when posts discussing the issue were deleted from the popular news discussion forum, Hacker News. Some accused moderators of the forum - part of Y Combinator, a startup incubator from which Posterous graduated - of intentionally removing the anti-Posterous discussions.

Pearson says the company didn't intend to offend anyone with its campaign, but that the wording was no accident.

"As for the switch campaign, we knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren't intentionally trying to piss people off," he says. "We believe we have the best product so any type of head-to-head comparison was going to benefit us."

Posterous may have seen a bump in usage over the last few weeks, but its reputation may have been damaged by its choice of language. Whether or not it was wise to go toe-to-toe with over a dozen large competitors by calling them "dying platforms," potentially alienating thousands of users of multiple services - the company seems pleased with the outcome.

"We have nothing against our competitors - we're just playing to win," says Pearson.

While unaffiliated parties have created versions of this process before, Linden says theirs is the first effort to achieve trans-world teleportation without logging out of one world and logging in to the other. No virtual goods were transported across the barrier, a major concern for Second Lifers concerned with virtual property theft and rapid depreciation of their assets' value.

All concerns aside for the moment, the possibilities are very exciting. Below is a corny but appropriate video produced about the event. (Removed until autoplay issue resolved, but available in the original announcement.)

Linden faces widespread user dissatisfaction about its platform's stability, intellectual property protection and other concerns. A lively discussion in comments on the announcement is a good place to get a look at the public mood.

Interoperability across virtual worlds could be an important step in maintaining the viability of Second Life. As an increasing number of virtual worlds proliferate, user and digital asset data portability is as likely to be essential for Second Life as it will be for other platforms online. Walled gardens will face increasing competition from the open world at large, so taking a leadership role in enabling that openness is a good way to thrive in the coming era of openness and portability.

You can laugh at Second Life and you can complain about it if you want, but we are excited about this news. Cynicism may have its place, but we'd argue that today isn't the time for it.

We congratulate Linden and IBM for their achievement and are excited to see what will come of this big step. Watch for news about the general availability of this functionality - once policy concerns are dealt with or once outside parties figure out how to achieve the same thing.