
I laughed at Posterous, but they proved me wrong - mgrouchy
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/i-dont-laugh-at-startup-ideas-anymore
======
csallen
I'd be interested in some stats on how many Posterous posts are made by email
vs being made on the site itself. I've got a Posterous and I've yet to make a
post by email. My reasoning is that making a blog post is such an involved
task that I'm not deterred by the process of logging in and doing it from
their site.

The main draw of Posterous to me has been the quality: The blogs look great
as-is, they have a powerful HTML/CSS editor, the comments are great, etc.

~~~
solutionyogi
You must be very different than I am. I used to have Wordpress hosted blog
which I would not update as much as I would like to. Reason? Whenever I was in
the Wordpress 'New Post' window, I would worry about post formatting, title of
the post, my potential readers etc. than about writing what's in my head at
the moment.

With Posterous, if there is any idea/thought in my head, I simply write down
an email and send it to post@posterous.com. If I have images to post, instead
of uploading them one by one, I simply forward them to Posterous and hey, I
get a nice image gallery on my blog. Even better, with Posterous' iPhone app,
I could send any interesting picture straight from my camera to my blog. What
I realized that I had created lot of artificial barrier to updating my blog
and Posterous took it all away. I use Posterous exclusively through email
(unless I need to delete/fix post) and I think it rocks!

~~~
iamwil
Depends on what you're writing about. For a while, I never used the email
posts, because it wasn't adequate to handle my code blogging. That's changed
since Chris implemented markdown.

If you just write text and post pictures, email is great.

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lhorie
>> _To use Posterous, all you have to do is send one email. You don’t even
need to create an account; just email post@posterous.com and they link it to
your email address automatically. Because you’re the only person with access
to your email, you don’t even need a password on Posterous._

I don't know anything about their blogging service, but as far as registering
for services goes, this idea is gold.

~~~
india
What about spoofed emails? Come to think of it, how does posterous handle
that? One way would be to mail the user back asking them to reply to confirm
and then recording the details of the genuine mail server. Does posterous do
that?

On the whole there is a lot to get wrong in this authentication method. I
would prefer if this doesn't spread to other web apps.

~~~
lhorie
From their faq page:

>> _Email can easily be spoofed, but Posterous has come up with some ways to
figure out if the email we receive comes from you. If we think it might not be
you, we ask you to confirm the email before we post it._

 _No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put
online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn't do
it._

------
photomatt
I'd be happy to share the usage stats of WP.com's post-by-email feature if
Posterous would be willing to do the same.

~~~
pmjoyce
Why not tell us anyway?

~~~
photomatt
Because I'm curious!

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arturadib
That's why I don't listen to anyone when it comes to assessing the viability
of any product. Ask two random people (experts included!) and the odds of you
getting diametrically opposite answers are pretty high.

Belief and perseverance is everything.

~~~
ekanes
There is value to listening to what people _say_ , but more important is
watching what they _do_.

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grandalf
I think Posterous mostly succeeded because of its clean design and cool name,
not because one can post by email.

~~~
alexro
Plus YC involvement. Post by email feature was the reason to talk about
Posterous though

~~~
flubba
Which seems like it just gave Posterous publicity. Trendiness + Reinventing
the wheel = Success?

~~~
seiji
Kind-of like Tumblr too. Every article seemingly focuses around the trendy,
hipster founder and not so much on the site.

~~~
kareemm
that's because normal readers care about founder stories, not features.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm curious: are you being sarcastic here?

I honestly don't care about the founder stories (good for them, sucks for
them, end of story). But the articles do really focus on the founders more
than features, and people are known to be silly (hence the never-dying market
for tabloids).

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d0m
Isn't it easy to send an email and put whatever email we want as the sender? I
was just wondering, does it means anyone could post on the post of someone
else?

~~~
dcurtis
I think they do some checking in the headers. It's not impossible to
masquerade as someone.

But how many people want to maliciously post to some random person's Posterous
blog? Probably not too many.

~~~
MrGamma
I don't think blackhats would be all over it, the links are completely
invisible to a search engine...

Maybe Smear Campaign artists might take to it. Or spammers...

~~~
alex_c
I'm not too familiar with Posterous, are all links nofollowed? Can't you post
arbitrary HTML to your own blog?

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sdh
For me, the most important point here is about how difficult it is for
existing companies to change directions in product vision and yet investors
will shy away from innovation based on the flawed "what if <huge company>
decides to do this?"

The tech landscape is never fully conquered and all it takes is one inspired,
and sometimes obvious, innovation to open the field back up.

~~~
OmarIsmail
This is a very good point. One of the most common questions that startups get
is "why can't big company Y do X?" and yet time and time again startups
succeed in such a space. Of course there are cases where company Y does do X,
notably Amazon, Twitter and Facebook. So I think the question or answer needs
to reflect the history of the particular companies in question.

And even then. A lot of times Company X does implement Y and it doesn't kill
or even slow the startup down. There are probably many reasons behind this.
Fundamentally though I think people should just stop asking this question. Or
not treat it as such a big deal. Because it's not in the grand scheme of
things.

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redorb
I think Posterous is winning based on the many factors below; but the one I
see most prominently is that a ton of YC startups use them as their company
blog.

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jgoewert
Posting by email makes complete sense. Think of how many office workers spring
upon something they want to post, but opening a webbrowser may be tracked or
their boss may see or something.

Though, having it be the driving selling feature... I would have found that
quite ridiculous. But, what do I know, I am over 30. My ideas about what the
current youth generation want is outdated. I didn't even think like most of
them when I was that age.

~~~
Sukotto

      Posting by email makes complete sense
    

Yes... in hindsight.

~~~
BrandonM
I honestly thought that blogging by email made a lot of sense before I heard
of Posterous. Of course, their implementation of it is pretty great.

Another blogging interface that makes sense to me is a message board. Each
blogger would have a forum (subforums would be allowed and would represent all
of that blogger's blogs). Each thread (the first post of the thread) in the
forum represents a blog post, and others' replies to the thread become the
blog comments.

I think that idea might have some legs, as it could help a lot with
discoverability. But what do I know?

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wdewind
How does posterous make/plan to make money?

~~~
rubinelli
I remember paid subscriptions mentioned in the interview with Calacanis.
Freemium tends to work well with this kind of service.

~~~
wdewind
Can you expand on this? IE: Would someone pay to host their blog, or would
someone pay to get access to someone else's blog? I've always been really
curious about Posterous, Tumblr and all the others who come up against this
problem (ie: great product with tons of users who love it and no clear
monetization).

~~~
phreanix
You would be surprised. This topic came up for tumblr users and I remember
reading that quite a few of them would pay for premium features.

They each all have their own business model, Tumblr I think is still tweaking
theirs but they currently offer paid themes. Tumblr users are incredibly
supportive of Tumblr.

Same goes for WP, and I'm sure Posterous. You will have the casual 'free'
users, and you'll have the users who will actually shell out a significant
amount to support their blogging medium.

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gaborcselle
There must be a few more ideas out there where you take something that already
exists, improve it by changing one of the variables, add some charming
cofounders, add the YC audience, and net out a successful startup.

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lazyant
Silly question: what's the advantage of Posterous versus say, Tumblr? With
Tumblr you can also post by email, it has templates and free domain redirect.

~~~
phreanix
So does WP, and blogger I believe.

It really is up to the user/s to decide what best suits them. The advantage is
the _choice_

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lurkinggrue
No password? How do they deal with spoofed email?

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billclerico
i snap photos on my iphone and then email them in. awesome. easier than
launching another app.

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u48998
Posterous email-to-post idea was so simple that it was confusing at the same
time. We then saw that they introduced bookmarklet and other standard blogging
features. Which to me suggest that not many people are using post-to-email
feature even though it is now available at every other micro-blogging
services. The simplicity of design almost always works in your favor though.

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zeynel1
What happens if I want to create another posterous blog with the same email,
is that possible?

~~~
dous
You can have multiple blogs associated with the same email. I'm just not sure
if it's possible to create a new one by sending an email as the first post.

