Last Sunday I spent some time with Steve Rubel, who is singlehandedly elevating Posterous to fame. A while ago I was asked by my friend Bill Reichert at Garage whether I thought Posterous would ever catch on, and I told him that even though it was easy, there were already too many blogging tools out there. I felt pretty smug when I said it, because I have been blogging since 1999 (and even before, although it wasn’t a blog, it was an E-Zine).
I was wrong; I suck. Tonight I was going through Google Reader and came upon Robert Scoble’s Posterous— his post about the valuation of Twitter, which was all the rage this weekend. But this was the first time I realized he had put it on Posterous.
[You have to understand that last night I spent the evening secretly making my OWN Posterous, because of that Rubel conversation, which took place at Scoble’s house. I finally had to try it. I resisted, because I already have a Tumblr, which i use to store my Tweets, and four or five blogs. I was so busy being industrious that I didn’t even know Robert had beat me to it. Crap.]
My first impression is that Posterous works backwards from Tumblr and Friendfeed, and I didn’t know that until last night. Tumblr and Friendfeed can take everything IN, as indeed Facebook and Twitter kind-of-can, but Posterous puts things OUT. I’m not even sure it can take things in. I think you have to start with Posterous as the hub.
Now watch what’s going to happen to me as I post this to Posterous. It will go out to Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. Then it will start bouncing off these services and going endlessly back and forth in a recusive loop, because when I set these services up years ago, I forgot what fed to what. I’ve got all kinds of makeshift bridges going that I’m sure I’ve overlooked, and you are going to see everything three times (or more).
Until I find a service that can merge and purge my duplicate status updates and posts, I don’t think I can use Posterous. There’s a limit to ubiquity.
Let me know how many times you see this:-)
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Inspired by Guy Kawasaki extolling the virtues of Posterous at BlogWorld E&E last year, I set up a Posterous blog in January. I haven't yet gotten around to the DNS process required to put it on my own domain. Guy described Posterous as a super easy blog platform and I mostly wanted to test it out as a possible platform for my father to use. It is indeed very easy to use.
Posterous can be an effective photo log. @Christinelu makes good use of it to post photos at http://christinelu.me/
I have found editing to be limited. You can tell by this article where I was unable to tighten up the lines on this post: http://lindashermangordon.posterous.com/ I sent a help request about this on August 9th and haven't heard back yet but they did answer a request back in January.
Posterous is causing major havoc in the blogging community, and I mean that in a good way. It keeps getting better every single day, and it is just too powerful to ignore. Don't give up on it yet.
I use posterous mostly for syndication-I have my own website, so I dont need something on my domain. However, I find amazing amounts of value in the ability to send something to one address and have it go everywhere-I can post a picture to my flickr, facebook, and website in 30 seconds. That, to me, has value.
I am not giving up. I'm learning it.