

Why I Chose Posterous: a Quick Review - JoelSutherland
http://www.jsuth.com/why-i-chose-posterous-a-quick

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PStamatiou
"Posterous is the most innovative blogging platform available today."

No offense to Posterous staff, but I think they have a lot of work to do
before it can really claim that title. I think WordPress currently holds that
title.

~~~
rantfoil
None taken -- we know there's a road ahead, but we're psyched and ready to
take on the challenge.

~~~
unalone
By the way, I think that the unwavering optimism of you guys is incredibly
inspiring. Every time I've talked with you (I emailed a few criticisms a while
back), I get nothing but incredible enthusiasm. I think I started out with a
pretty negative reaction towards Posterous, because I'm a Tumblr addict, but
now I'm rooting for you guys 100%. Keep it up!

------
bootload
_"... Posterous has designed a blogging platform where the entire focus is on
email. Your email client is the admin interface. For those of us that have an
email client open all day, posterous seamlessly inserts blogging into the
day's natural workflow. ..."_

No I disagree with that one.

Maybe my workflow is a bit different but I've found the posting of blogs,
images, short messages etc using a purposeful designed interface works better.
The bit that doesn't work is joining them together. Flickr, twitter, blogger,
wordpress allow you to do one task well. Replacing this process by email is a
bottleneck because email clients (in my case 'Evolution') are horrendous
things to use as a multi-purpose tool. There is no one way to map what you
want to achieve to each service. For example:

\- add a blog entry: include title a couple of pages of text with images and
some urls (worked)

\- twitter entry: quick message to a person with a longish url (text length >
140char, failed and url chopped

\- flickr entry: tags + description + title + image (title failed, no tags
allowed, no licensing of original images allowed)

I've tried these combinations and had success with the blog, moderate success
with the twitter and bit of a failure with the flickr entry. I don't think the
idea behind Posterous is bad. It's just the tools I have at my disposal are so
clumsy. So the idea of an email interface while it works for me has a lot of
rough edges and built-in frustration. Where Posterous does work well is
integrating the bits you post, not perfectly but enough to be useful.

~~~
unalone
That would be an interesting challenge: seeing if you could create a single
interface that did all that WELL. As in, figuring out how to interpret a
plaintext input and sort it out into categories.

~~~
bootload
_"... seeing if you could create a single interface that did all that WELL
..."_

Funny enough I've worked on this for a while and while it's a good idea the
effort required is somewhat less than using existing application GUI's to
enter data and extract data via feeds or API's. The idea I tried was creating
an interface to update multiple services (twitter, flickr, delicious ...) via
one page, send to a database and use the api's to auto-update. The hard bits
...

\- how do you add more services easily?

\- how will your display code handle lots of empty fields? Lots of
conditionals in your templates. Is your templating engine up to it?

\- how do you selectively and easily send data to one application but not
another, some times? Can you change for instance sending links to flickr but
not to delicious on a one time basis?

\- how do you handle sites that have no API's or feeds? Like hackernews which
had neither for a long time.

The one key advantage of this method is you capture data before you propagate
it. So if your well thought out 100 word post (with references) dies because
your browser crashes or you press the back button you have a local copy.

------
snewe
I believe you can do almost all the things mentioned in the entry with
Tumblr's email feature (flash-encoding is through Vimeo).

<http://www.tumblr.com/goodies>

<http://www.tumblr.com/vimeo>

~~~
unalone
I always feel like there's an anti-Tumblr vibe on HN, and I've never
understood why. And I seem to recall Marco (one of the lead designers of
Tumblr) - making a jab at Paul Graham at some point - though I might be making
that latter bit up, since Marco jabs at a lot of people, which is why his blog
is such a fun read.

Is there some enmity between the two sets of developers? Is it a Boston-
versus-NY thing?

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abhishekdesai
I love posterous too, I think they have really made it easy for people like me
to post who are having interesting contents in their emails but never get time
to update their blogs. Now I can just forward the email I am done. Later on
when I can visit through my posts.

------
jacobscott
I'm now using posterous, although I have a in-stasis tumblr. Has anyone
spotted a good comparison between the two?

I like the intuitive autopost-to-twitter, works well for me.

~~~
unalone
Marco had one that was pretty scathing back a little while ago. But I'm
guessing he's considered to have some bias.

~~~
jacobscott
link :)?

~~~
unalone
[http://tumblelog.marco.org/40558829/sad-trombone-beats-
tumbl...](http://tumblelog.marco.org/40558829/sad-trombone-beats-tumblr-for-
simplicity)

It's more anti Techcrunch than it is anti-Posterous, though.

------
iamah
now to find one person to read my writings, besides me.

~~~
rantfoil
iamah -- if you use posterous, I will read your stuff. =)

~~~
iamah
why tank you, but I'll spare you

