Posterous Challenges Tumblr With New Bookmarklet
When we first reviewed Posterous, we called it a 'minimalist blogging service.' All you have to do to start blogging and sharing content on the service is to send an email to post AT posterous.com and it will automatically set up a blog for you. Now, however, Posterous is expanding its service and slightly changing its direction by adding a bookmarklet that puts it on a direct collision course with tumblr, the popular microblogging site.
Supported Services
Most importantly, Posterous' new bookmarklet automatically extracts videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Revision3, blip.tv, and many others. It also recognizes music on imeem and SoundCloud, as well as documents on Slideshare, scribd, and Docstoc. The bookmarklet also picks up on photos from flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, and you can even include live video from Seesmic, qik, and justin.tv. 
In addition, the bookmarklet also recognizes embedded documents from these services on other sites and allows you to post them to your Posterous.
Autopost
Thanks to Posterous' auto-post feature, you can forward your posts to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, as well as to most major blogging services, including Tumblr. Sadly, Posterous does not (yet?) support posting to FriendFeed and it can't save a copy of your links to more traditional boomarking services like delicious.
Taking on Tumblr
Sadly, Posterous still doesn't offer an API that would allow third-party developers to easily create applications on top of the service. Tumblr, on the other hand, has cultivated a rich ecosystem of third-party apps.
Posterous, however, has a dedicated fanbase and the simplicity of the service has served it well over the last six months. This new feature will surely help it to gain a lot of new users, as it massively expands the usefulness and functionality of Posterous.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Why do I see the posterious yellow note at the top of some sites? Is that something the blogger has added to there layout, or something dynamic that is placed there by the service because I've signed up and the page has postable content?
I'm confused, and that doesn't happen often.
A great step forward for the Posterous product. It's baffling that they provide practically no support for posting through their site (vs. via email). This strategy seems to disregard users who want to preview posts or create posts containing multiple bits of media interspersed among the text.
Posted by: Andrei M. Marinescu
|
February 4, 2009 1:45 PM
An API is coming soon. You're absolutely right that building an ecosystem is a critical part of a site like ours.
We're excited to see how Posterous grows -- it's hard to believe we've existed for 6 months.
good point Andrei - but I think this might be the first step in this direction. They started out with the email strategy to set themselves apart from the rest and now they slowly start adding more traditional means of posting to Posterous.
Posted by: Frederic
|
February 4, 2009 1:52 PM
Although you cant post directly into friendfeed, you can set up posterous as a blog site within the friendfeed control panel. It essentially achieves the same goal.
posterous' creator is also on Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/garrytan
Posted by: Eren Emre Kanal
|
February 4, 2009 2:15 PM
Hi Andrei,
Right now Posterous is focussing on email, and the bookmarklet, but posting attachments via a web page is something that will definitely come in the future.
In terms of previews: all email clients have drafts so you can save posts in progress there. And if you want to see what it looks like on Posterous before posting it: just email it to private@posterous.com. You can see the post as it will be published publicly, and when it's ready, make it public.
All rich email clients like Mail.app, Thunderbird, and Outlook support images inlined between text. But this is something webmail users don't get.
Of course the real power of posting by email is when you consider how it's already built into Picasa, iPhoto, Aperture, and most of the other media applications on your computer. It's one step posting from any application or device.
Interesting new feature, wonder how it'll change the use of the site. I guess I don't use that aspect of Tumblr, so I'm not seeing the benefit of the bookmarklet.
Right now, for me, the power is in the emailing routing of content through their autoposting. I can create content from anywhere via email, and have it easily routed to one site, all sites, or a custom subset of the sites I've setup for autoposting.
I just compared it to Switchabit here.
http://lifeinlists.com/2009/02/switch-those-bits-a-new-centralized-publishing-tool/
I closed my Typepad account and freezed my Blogger account to switch to Posterous some months ago. It is just the ultimate solution to blog via phone and/or computer. And it works really fine. But I won't use the bookmarklet as I use Posterous for blogging rather than like a sharing box, I would be more happy to see the Posterous team to allow more customization (just a bit on the right colum) on the template. Keep up the good work.
Yes!
An API is coming soon. You're absolutely right that building an ecosystem is a critical part of a site like ours.