As most of you probably know, I’m a big fan of WordPress, what with being the lead organizer for WordCamp Portland and having founded the Portland WordPress User Group and all. That said, Posterous has been making a lot of waves lately with Steve Rubel now using it for all of his publishing and even Chris Brogan giving it a shot. I decided to use Posterous to blog our recent roadtrip, publishing text and photos from the road.
The big differentiator between Posterous and a traditional blog platform like WordPress is that all content is published via email. Sending text to Posterous creates a text post. Including a photo or video attachment results in those being shown on the post. If multiple photos are attached, a gallery is created. Posterous’ other notable feature is that it can then notify other social networks of your content. Photos can be sent to Flickr or Facebook. Links to the Posterous post can be published to Twitter or a Facebook news feed. Videos can be sent to YouTube, Vimeo, or the like.
My overall impression was that post-by-email was a great solution for moblogging from a smartphone, but the limitations of the service mean that I wouldn’t consider it for any sort of permanent blog/web presence. The look/feel can’t be customized, and my of the “nice to haves” of a full blog platform (Gravatar, OpenID support, threaded comments, etc.) are missing. I know that Posterous is under development and I’d expect to see these type of features in the future, but for now I don’t think it can be seen as anything more than a plumbing system to mass-publish content across the web.
As such a plumbing system, it works great. I had no problems using their email interface to specify if I wanted my content to go everywhere (in my case Posterous, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook) or just to a subset of the services. One gotcha that I ran into was that because I have my Facebook feed setup to import from Flickr, when I posted a photo to both Flickr and Facebook it showed up twice on Facebook. This isn’t a fault of Posterous at all, but rather me needing to be more granular in my cross posting. The one Posterous-to-Facebook annoyance that is a limitation is that when posts are made with photos on Posterous, the photos get put into a Facebook album and the blog post gets pushed to the Facebook news feed, but there’s no connection.
Overall Posterous worked great for pushing a variety of content to a variety of places. The rather spartan web interface, lack of customization, and lack of extensibility limits its usefulness for a more traditional blog or website presence. A lot of Posterous’ functionality could be duplicated via WordPress plugins. For a simple publishing mechanism, Posterous is great, but for a full-featured blog platform, WordPress remains king.
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Welcome back. I enjoyed your “posts from afar”. I agree with your sentiments, Posterous seems very moblog friendly, but the inability to tweak for posterity sake, for now, makes it not a “final destination” for quantities of quality content.
Would love to catch up soon about your train posts/blog. Very awesome stuff.
Mitch
My train blog is a bit neglected at the moment, but I have plans (for when I have some “spare” time… heh)
From the reader end, I thought it was perfect for the trip blog. Simple, loads quickly, easy to navigate. Enjoyed reading it.
Can you edit after you post to Posterous via email? I agree with you that they will likely offer more useful bells and whistles later.
Did you compare to http://www.tumblr.com? If so what made you choose Posterous?
Yes, you can edit posts by logging into the site over the web. I didn’t compare to Tumblr although I know the services are similar. I wanted to try out Posterous given the fact that they seem to have some traction and buzz at the moment.
I was going back and forth between WP on Thesis and Posterous. Most of my posts are published mobile and having post via email feature that Posterous provides seemed to be a huge advantage. However, I still wanted to the flexibility of WP, not only for apps but for greater seo. I even had Posterous posting to my WP blog for a few days for test purposes…Eh.
I think there is a growing gap between the “mobile blogger” and the traditional blog(ger). Services like Posterous (and even typepad) make it easier for all to “mass-publish” content on the go.
I decided to stick with WP in hopes that they recognize that mobile blogging is a growing segment. They seem to be off to a good start considering their rapid (once they decided to build it) progress with their mobile app for iPhone and BlackBerry. I’ve been using the BB app with good success.
Thanks for this excellent post. I’ve been trying to figure out how Posterous (and other microblogs) fit in, between Twitter and WP.
I feel like a late-comer to this post, only six or seven months after you wrote it! Thanks for the comparison, these are the two platforms I am most drawn to and need to figure which one works best for me, or perhaps how best to use the two together.