ReadWriteWeb

Posterous, the niftiest self-publishing platform you've never used, just rolled out a whole new metaphor for the service called Posterous Spaces. What Posterous - and any other apparent blogging service, for that matter - used to call 'sites' are now called spaces. Spaces allow you to publish content to selected audiences. That's right; Posterous Spaces are no longer to be thought of as simply "blogs" or what-have-you. They're gunning for Google Plus and Facebook now.

The Posterous iPhone app has been updated to incorporate spaces, but the announcement doesn't mention the Android app. Posterous has also improved ways of finding and following spaces, adding a 'Popular' tab for real-time highlights from around Posterous and an 'Activity' tab showing likes, comments, follows and such from your spaces and those you follow.

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.

Whenever I'm checking my email, one of two things can happen. I get an email, click on a link, and 20 minutes later I'm not sure how I ended up on Facebook but yes, I would love to attend a dinner party next Thursday. If I'm truly task-focused, however, I'll at the very least end up with a screen full of so many new tabs that I forget which tab I'm on in the first place. Either way, email can set me off on a confusing and messy adventure and Microsoft has an answer I'd love to see become a standard.

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft is announcing a new type of interactive email that keeps you focused on getting through your email while still being able to look at pictures, watch videos, accept friend requests and more.

Despite the cries of email overload and email's demise, email marketing remains an important way for small businesses to stay in contact with customers. But crafting then formatting an email newsletter can be time-consuming, particularly if it involves having to learn how to use yet another online platform.

The microblogging site Posterous is known for making blogging as simple as sending an email, and now you can use that same service to transfer that blog content back into an email newsletter.

The anticipation in the tech world is palpable, as SXSW Interactive kicks off at the end of the week. We expect to see lots of startups launch over the course of the event, and LaunchRock, the creator of viral launch pages for startups is putting the pieces in place to make its own, newly launched service even more useful.

We covered LaunchRock here last month, following the startup's creation over Philly Startup Weekend. LaunchRock makes it incredibly simple to get interested users signed up for your startup service or product, pre-launch. LaunchRock has added more features, including an embeddable widget and an API so that you can integrate the service into your current sign-up process.

Garry Tan has announced that he is leaving Posterous, the ultra-simplistic microblogging company he helped found in 2008. Tan wrote on his blog today that it was time to move on and that he would be taking an advisory role with the company in order to do what he was most passionate about - work with startups.

"My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products," writes Tan. "To that end, I've decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience."

Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best 'little company.' In past years we've given this honor to Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube (in 2006, the year it was acquired by Google), Twitter (in 2007, before it went mainstream), Zoho, and Aardvark. As you can see, many of these companies have gone onto much bigger things. When we select the Best LittleCo winner each year, we look for small companies (less than 100 employees) that have set the online world alight.

This year there was plenty of competition. Foursquare won the battle of the check-in apps, Flipboard created an innovative iPad app that caught our imagination, Instagram burst onto the scene with a mobile photo app. The LittleCo that impressed us the most though was New York-based Tumblr.

Today, Posterous, the site we previously referred to as a "minimalist blogging platform", has again expanded its functionality in its own, minimalist fashion. This time, rather than adding rich editing features or increasing social interaction the service has gone and reinvented one of the Internet's "wheels" - the email list.

We spoke with Posterous co-founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal yesterday and he told us that the new feature is an "email list on steroids" and that it's "the last email list you'll ever need."

One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it's Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online buddies, or sharing a favorite video, photo or quote on Tumblr. All of these activities have given millions of people an opportunity to add their voice to the Web.

Tumblr and similar services are sometimes termed light blogging, as they enable people to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr is the market leader amongst such tools, followed by Posterous, Soup.io, Noovo and others. Tumblr has grown the most in recent times, but Posterous has fought hard. Let's review the fast-moving and often entertaining moves in this market over 2010.

Posterous, the minimalist blogging platform, may have allowed users to post to their blogs via email, or even the specially-formatted Posterous for mobile devices, but now it's gone that one extra step. Posterous for the iPhone is here, allowing users to post, manage their settings, upload media and even geo-tag their updates.