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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