

Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy - rantfoil
http://blog.posterous.com/get-your-group-on-introducing-posterous-group

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guynamedloren
So let me get this straight. Your big pitch is "Sharing privately with groups
is broken right now ... Multi-attachment, inbox-cluttering emails."

And you're solving that problem (a few sentences later) with "Every time you
post to the group, she'll receive the full content as an email. She can reply
directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update."

How exactly does that solve any inbox-clutter problems whatsoever? If
anything, it seems like it'd create even more inbox clutter. Am I missing
something here? Sending more emails results in less clutter?

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ryanwaggoner
This would have been more interesting and innovative a couple years ago, but
now that everyone and their mother (and grandmother, and grandfather) are on
Facebook, I think Facebook Groups is a fine solution that offers all the
features listed here.

I had this exact problem twice in the last month, and both times, I found that
everyone in the two real-world groups I was trying to bring online was already
on Facebook. Literally every single person out of maybe 50 people total,
spanning age ranges from teenagers to folks in their late 50s. I found it much
easier to get them to use it than it would have been if I had to explain this
new posterous thing.

~~~
a4agarwal
We found that Facebook Groups felt more like a group wall than a product for
sharing and collaboration. You can't send attachments via email, and you can't
reply with anything besides plain text.

Posterous Groups makes email the core of the product. You can do everything
via email including creating a group and replying with rich media attachments.
There aren't any restrictions on what you can post.

Facebook Groups doesn't work well as a mobile experience. It's important for
me to be able to post and consume content from my iphone. This works well in
email and using the Posterous iPhone app.

While Facebook does have a large user base, there will always be people who
aren't on the service or don't sign in to it regularly. We're firm believers
that email is the best way to reach people.

We've made it seamless to get non Posterous users to understand how a group
works and how they should participate. Give it a shot and please send feedback
our way.

Thanks!

~~~
revorad
Can a Posterous group autopost to a Facebook Group?

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a4agarwal
we don't autopost to facebook groups right now but we might add that in the
future. You can also autopost to a facebook profile or page

~~~
revorad
That's great, thanks. I didn't realise until this announcement that you guys
are competing with facebook in some respects (at least in terms of where
people spend time online). The way you guys are going, I won't be surprised
you will be one of the biggest players on the internet in a few years.

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maxklein
I just tried it. It works well as a replacement for Google Wave - but it's
nicer. Also, the emails means that there is instant notifications, which was a
flaw that gwave had.

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mike-cardwell
If I send a HTML email to a group which contains an iframe, an img tag, and an
input field of type "image", all referencing a remote URL, the process of
viewing the email in the posterous interface automatically causes the browser
to fetch each of those resources.

This is a privacy leak. You should remove references to these remote resources
when displaying a message in the posterous web interface. You should then
provide an option to "Load Remote Images". Much like most email clients do.

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mike-cardwell
You have a tracking image embedded in the emails. It points at a redirector
script which does no validation of the destination url. This is highly
abusable. Example:

[http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.c...](http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F)

~~~
mike-cardwell
Ouch. It looks like you've done this on purpose. If I send an email with a
link to the list, the link in the email I get back bounces through
r.posterous.com.

This _will_ be abused by spammers...

~~~
mike-cardwell
Ok. You have yet another open redirector here:
<http://posterous.com/logout?jumpto=>

Not good...

~~~
a4agarwal
Thanks, Mike. We're fixing this up right now.

~~~
mike-cardwell
And yet it's still not fixed.

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wdewind
Cool. What is Posterous's business model?

~~~
revorad
They've now got a solid product and userbase. The business model could be any
of advertising, affiliate marketing, lead generation, premium features,
ecommerce.

~~~
sbisker
Totally agreed. But which _is_ it? The decision on any of those models, if not
properly considered, could have impacts that reverberate through their product
and userbase. Advertising, done wrong, could break their clean aesthetic.
Affiliate marketing, done wrong, could hurt people's trust. You get the idea.
The business model is a part of the design, in that it works in concert with
it - and people are eager to see the fuller vision of posterous realized.

That said, I agree. I think it's great that they're taking some time to see
how their product evolves, especially when they seem to sincerely want to
"change the game." One thing YC companies seem to do well is that they have
the patience to take the time to explore those markets alongside their users,
instead of dragging them into a business plan that detracts from how users
want to use the product in their daily lives.

EDIT: Whoops, this answers part of the question, from their FAQ: Yes,
Posterous is enthusiastically a free service. Later, we'll be adding premium
features we know you'll love, but there will always be a useful free version
you can use.

~~~
revorad
Sachin's mentioned planned premium features in the past, so I think that's a
good bet. They could also do one-off deals with big companies, like they once
did with Coca-cola and Loopt recently did with Virgin. They've got a good
brand and smart founders, I expect they will do just fine.

~~~
jackowayed
Honestly, I startups often say "premium features" because that's something
that users understand and aren't scared by.

Posterous has raise $5M, so they really need at least a $40M exit, preferably
bigger. Are they really going to make enough for that kind of exit from a
small percentage of their users paying, say, $5-10/month for premium blogging
features? Doubtful.

I think their plan, as well as that of many other startups, is to grow as much
as possible and then either find a way to monetize their large number of free
users or get bought by a company that wants some combination of the users, the
employees, and the technology. But the average user won't be reassured when
seeing this in an FAQ:

"It's free, what's the catch?"

"We want to get as many users as possible while making no money, and then
we'll find some way to either bring in revenue or sell the company"

Users would worry that Posterous either will die one day when they run out of
money or eventually realize they need to make money and ruin the product. But
"you'll always be able to keep your same free product, but we'll add some even
better features that cost money" isn't scary.

This isn't unique to Posterous. I don't remember which startup there was, but
I saw "premium features" on the FAQ of another startup and literally laughed
out loud because I knew that the combination of the amount of funding they had
raised and the small amount that most users would be willing to pay meant that
that was a lie.

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emmett
Bug: I already had a posterous account, and whenever I try to create a new
group it just sends me in circles and breaks. :-(

~~~
rantfoil
We're tracking this bug down now -- mind letting me know repro steps? We'll
fix it asap -- garry@posterous.com

Thanks Emmett!

~~~
revorad
Posts don't show up in the right pane in Firefox 3.0. I reported this bug in
the beta test.

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Splines
Two questions:

\- Can groups be members of other groups?

\- In gmail when I click "reply" to a mail sent to the group, it just goes
back to the sender (there is a "Reply To" visible in the mail, but gmail isn't
using it for some reason).

Otherwise, neat stuff. Not everybody in my family is on Facebook, and others
in the family are leery of using FB because of privacy issues (unintentional
information sharing between friend circles).

~~~
radicaldreamer
1\. Absolutely, you can be a part of any combination of public and private
groups that you like.

2\. It should go to a custom email address and will function as a reply to the
post. The sender's name is the author of post or reply in that notification.

~~~
Groxx
I think you read 1 inside-out. The question was basically if groups can be
nested inside groups.

~~~
radicaldreamer
Whoops... well, then the answer to #1 is no, they can't.

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unicornporn
And when does this gang plan to make some money? I fail to see a business
model taking form.

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mike-cardwell
I love the way you've made this work. However, it does not behave well with
PGP signed emails. When a message is MIME/PGP signed, the attachment is
stripped and dropped. When a message is signed inline, posterous corrupts the
message leaving the header in place, but dropping the signature. If this is
fixed, I am likely to use this service for some technical lists.

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sw1205
How is this different to frid.ge or neetly.com?

~~~
a4agarwal
Think of Posterous Groups more like an email list on steroids than a web based
groups product. You can invite people by adding their email address to the
group, and they dont have to sign up for anything to use the service.

The service is fully functional as an email list, but better since it handles
rich media well.

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scrrr
Maybe its the WikiLeaks debacle lately, but somehow my first thoughts were
"cool, like that" and then "i cant use it, because i cant trust posterous with
my data"..

~~~
revorad
You'll have to trust _someone_.

~~~
scorpion032
In this case, your email provider, everyone's email provider _and_ posterous.

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krmmalik
Genuine question. How is this better than Yahoo Groups?

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fanf2
If it doesn't require confirmation from group members, how do they stop
spammers from abusing it?

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sielskr
Can a person join an existing Posterous Group using only email?

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dvdt
Wow I had the idea to do exactly this only a few days ago.

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kiranryali
Why would someone use this over google groups?

~~~
a4agarwal
better member management (people don't have to create accounts); photos,
video, audio, documents are all supported natively; web view is far superior.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

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ph0rque
Hmmm... is this slinkset's successor?

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rokhayakebe
You guys beat me to it (launching something similar this week). Very nice,
indeed.

