

Twitter and Posterous - brlewis
http://mattmaroon.com/2009/04/20/twitter-and-posterous/

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kyro
To be quite honest, I don't think Twitter and Posterous are comparable, but I
do think both of them have tapped into two huge modes of human communication.

Prior to Twitter, there was no method to capturing stream of consciousness.
Sure, there was AIM, but those chats are really transient. Twitter allows me
to broadcast the funny youtube video I just found, or a frustration I may be
experiencing with a company, and to have friends ride the stream with me. Not
only that, we get to look into the streams of celebrities, something
completely new. I didn't get Twitter for a time, too, but have realized its
value and the 140 character limit, in my opinion, allows messages to retain
their stream of consciousness type characteristic.

Posterous, on the other hand, is a more structured, more effort-in-your-post
version of Twitter. But it's also an interesting middle-ground between both
Twitter and conventional blogging, which I think is another form of human
communication no one has yet explored. Blogging is for me to write a well
thought out essay. Twitter is for saying 'omg check out this discounted
laptop.' Posterous gives me a place to post things of importance with ease, in
a nice structured manner. I don't want to throw up pictures of my friends at
the beach on Twitter, or write a blog post about it, I want to put it on
Posterous. However, I don't want to litter my Posterous with random links and
thoughts. In those respects, I think Posterous and Twitter really aren't
competitors. They both serve two different purposes, to me at least, and there
is room for both to thrive.

~~~
brlewis
They compete when people choose whether to do what Twitter is good for or what
Posterous is good for. That's what made this post more interesting to me than
a Posterous vs Tumblr post would have been.

~~~
kyro
A spoon and a fork are competitors in cases where you're eating corn or rice,
but you don't use a fork to sip soup or a spoon to eat salad. Sure, there will
be instances in which Twitter and Posterous compete, but I think those might
be less frequent corn or rice scenarios. I'm trying to show him that there are
two distinct purposes both services serve.

Maybe a Twitterous spork is begging to be made. :p

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snewe
I don't see the difference between Posterous and Tumblr. The latter also has
an email address that you can send anything to and a great bookmarklet. Is it
simply that Posterous sells themselves differently?

~~~
a4agarwal
For other services, posting by email is an afterthought. it's poorly
implemented, severely limited.

With Posterous, you can send us _anything_ by email and we'll handle it.
Multiple images, video, audio, other documents all in a single message. That
message can also have full html and we'll publish it all.

We autopost to Twitter (tumblr does this now) but also to Flickr, Facebook,
Tumblr, and all the major blog platforms. So you can email us once, we'll
handle all the rich media, and then update _all_ the websites you use.

We also have a great bookmarklet. You should try it out.

~~~
snewe
I did as you suggested: the bookmarklet is quite awesome. Moreover, combined
with autopost it effectively fixes all the things wrong with the wordpress.org
bookmarklet. Sold. Can I import my Tumblr account?

------
rue
I dunno if I am stating the obvious, here, but Twitter's inanity is entirely
dependent on _whose "tweets" you are reading_.

More generally, in the community I am involved in, Twitter has stepped into
the gap left by the lack of a comfortable mechanism of interaction through
Atom/RSS feeds ("blogs", comments and trackbacks are not convenient enough to
use for many purposes).

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pxlpshr
I find myself going back and forth on Twitter too, but mostly because of what
will happen to the service as it approaches popular-mass; the beauty and grace
of it is diluted to garbage and noise (which is then retweeted). However, I do
believe Twitter is a rare startup and deserves its attention. I am in the camp
that sees Twitter as a once-in-a-blue-moon event; a communication layer this
thin and robust RARELY comes along (much less with this type of adoption rate
and explosive growth). Posterous is great and all, but it has nothing on the
communication-legos that is Twitter's API. For example, we're integrating
Twitter into our exercise app which I think serves a purpose, as oppose to
simply leveraging viral ads benefits.

What bothers me about 'social media' in general is that I'm reminded of
unionized labor. There's no doubt that customers are extremely important, but
there are problems when a mass audience assumes each individual to be the #1
priority and/or the customer is ALWAYS correct. This type of self importance
is becoming a problem on the internet with millions looking for a unique
identity and it's wearing on me, both as an observer and business owner who
has to deal with armchair customers.

ps. I wish there was an auto-block for self-proclaimed 'social media'
professionals; it's the new SEO.

~~~
simonw
I don't think Twitter will be destroyed by mass uptake. I don't care if 100
million people are spouting rubbish on Twitter, I'll just follow the few
hundred who aren't. Twitter Search will become less useful, but the obvious
next step for that (albeit difficult to build) would be to let me search
tweets just from people who I am following.

~~~
pxlpshr
I both agree and disagree with you. I agree because as you mentioned,
Twitter's unique structure in regard to following/followers helps minimize
that type of noise. However, retweeting for example is not something you can
block and that's where I see problems.

Certainly I always have the right to unfollow or block, but it doesn't solve
the problem if I want to continue following a tech entrepreneur who's side
hobby may very well be celebrity gossip or American Idol. (god save us)

Fortunately (Twitter's API is what separates them), clients like TweetDeck
provide a secondary interface that's more adaptable to social changes through
prioritization, customization, etc. If it wasn't for this, I would likely not
be using Twitter... and any lifestream-competitor should give this a lot of
consideration I think before trying to compete.

 _edit_ man i can't write today, sorry for edits.. it's monday.

------
ivankirigin
I have often tweeted a picture by emailing posterous and making the subject
what i'd like to tweet. It works really well, and the picture also goes to
Flickr & Tumblr, which is hot.

~~~
mattmaroon
I do love the Flickr integration.

------
sanj
I just used Posterous to successfully document my daughter's arrival into the
world.

I give it two thumbs up.

It was painless and straightforward to snap pictures on my iPhone and
immediately have my family see them. And given the state of sleep deprivation
we're going through, mindless is exactly where I need stuff to be.

~~~
mattmaroon
Just think if the iPhone did video like, you know, every other phone on the
market. Of course, maybe that would be a bad thing for a childbirth.

------
teej
> "all I see when I look at Twitter are outdated limitations and people going
> to great pains to work around them"

Personally, I feel like the 140 character limit helps in one crucial way - it
gets people to think twice before they hit the "Update" button.

~~~
tdavis
I would argue the exact opposite. Because the amount of information you can
transmit is so limited, it makes it far easier _not_ to think twice. Think
about it: writing a blog post is, for most people, an activity which requires
a good deal of thought, revision, and editing. And why shouldn't it -- you can
write and include anything you want.

Compare that to Twitter: how long does it take to think of 140 characters to
spew into a tiny box? Not very long. And since it is so easy, it can be done
20 times per day! And since there are so many "posts", you don't really have
to care about the _quality_ of those posts individually. You can see this on a
lot of blogs, too -- once-poignant bloggers set out to write a post per day
and suddenly it becomes obvious they are grasping for topics, jumping sharks,
and simply putting stuff out there that is of low quality.

There are two ends to the writing spectrum, and on either end are the
essayists and the, uh, twitter-ists. The essayists don't release very often,
but when they do it is close to a foregone conclusion that the material will
be worth reading. The twitterists release a dozen times per day and while they
will occasionally, perhaps merely by statistical probability, release
something worth reading, it is close to a foregone conclusion that the
material will _not_ be worth reading.

Now we get to the "masses" part, and why Twitter will take off. Answer this
question:

The majority of people are: (a) essayists, (b) twitterists

The answer is quite obvious. Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought
which are things that most people either do not possess or do not exercise
very often.

~~~
teej
> Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought which are things that most
> people either do not possess or do not exercise very often.

This is the exact reason where I think Twitter's restriction shines. The
average person isn't going to rethink or edit their tweets. In some cases, the
140 limit forces them to, without getting in the way of the user experience.

Type type type type. Is my message under (140) characters? yes -> post. No ->
rewrite it.

\------------------

I will agree with you that the people worth reading aren't on Twitter. But I
think there's something to be said about making a large number of average
people marginally better at something.

------
Tiktaalik
"I don’t have to worry about shortening URLs, and I don’t need some Adobe Air
client just to make it tolerable."

This quote sums up the argument between the two services pretty well.
Posterous seems like an interesting middle ground between the super, uber
short Twitter and other blogging services.

