New Y Combinator startup Posterous launches today with what might be the simplest blogging platform to date. Yes, it’s even easier to use than Tumblr, which has a cult-following of users who like to post lots of pictures and short messages.
Here’s how you create a blog on Posterous - email something to post@posterous.com. You’re done.
Here’s how you post something new on Posterous - see paragraph above. The subject line of the email is the post title, the text area is the content. You can also email photos, videos and sounds files, which will be displayed in a custom Flash player on the site. My new Posterous blog, for example, is here.
Is this a lot like Tumblr? Yes, although account creation by a single message to a generic email is a great way to help this spread via mobile devices (you have to create an account on Tumblr’s website first, then you can start emailing to a unique email id). Posterous also has comments on posts, something Tumblr is just starting to roll out to some users.
Another great thing about Posterous - you can choose to have comments emailed to you, and you can reply to the comment by simply responding back to the email (I wish Wordpress had that feature). If you choose to register your account at Posterous (which means creating a password), you can also follow other Posterous bloggers.
The services are otherwise somewhat similar. Both are excellent for simply emailing in vacation photos and videos.
One problem Posterous may have is fake posts via masked emails (it’s relatively easy to mask emails so that they appear to be sent from anyone you like). Posterous says they’ll watch header information like IP address, email client and other data points to sniff out fakes, and users can also request a unique email. We’ll see how they do with that - and we’ll give a free TechCrunch Tshirt to the first person who manages to do a fake post on our Posterous blog (but it can’t be off color, disgusting, or NSFW in any way) (Update: ok, we have a winner).
Tumblr is a lot more feature rich than Posterous, which make sense since Posterous is only two months old and has two employees. But Posterous is dead simple to use and does the mobile blogging thing very well. New features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.
Both Posterous and Tumblr compete with services like Twitter, Friendfeed and a slew of mobile/photo blogging platforms like Mobog and others mentioned here.
@48
…hahaha, is that a web 2.0 put down..lol i’ll have to remember that one.
@32
‘MessageDance has been doing this for more than 8 months.’
That name sounds really gay…sorry fudgepackers.
Neat stuff, I like it!
I immediately tried to use it to capture a round of concert alerts and send users to posterious nstead of their inboxes, but I’m not sure it worked.
Would be a great way to log automated alerts that usually get lost in email now, kind of like a persistent mail folder, and I can see some great uses for SEO purposes too.
The name sounds too much like ‘posterior’ IMHO
Will it be possible to make non-public postings, and set that as the default for your account (like on twitter where you can make tweets private)??
nice going…
re: messagedance I have to concur. After staring at the page for several minutes I have no bloody idea what the thing does. ‘express yourself’ is pretty meaningless.
Is it related to HamsterDance?
Now HampsterDance, I like… http://www.hampsterdance.com/
This site is so damn well done, congrats guys!
I, too, want to know how Vinod Bhoastla can claim what he does, I certainly didn’t give messagedance a pass. It doesn’t seem to be a destination site, so the relevant code is on the back end. How would Vinod Bhoastla know anything about whether it looks like, “coding with his non-dominant hand in QBasic”? The site is a bit cluttered.
As for relevance to me, both sites are both social media shit-pile wastes of time.
Vinod is obviously an ABCD.
All I can say is it surely doesn’t take much to bring their service down.. and watch out, here comes the spammers
naysayers are wrong. this service is a clear and definite solution to one of the biggest problems in the world. blogger, wordpress, typepad and the rest are obviously waay too hard to use (that is why they have a tiny, shrinking userbase) and make you create an account (which is very confusing). Yay! Spaghetti!
So their signup process is a basic registration with email confirmation, minus the registration. Isn’t that the same amount of steps required for Tumblr (which does not require an email confirmation)? So once you’re past the “simplicity” of registering, you’re back at where Tumblr stands, only this time you have less to customize and almost no community.
Why should I switch?
This makes no sense to me: email is a chore to use, much more than, say, the Tumblr share bookmarklet or Thwirl. So despite its radically minimalist intent, Posterous sounds to me like it would actually be harder to use than Tumblr. Now, if you could update via Twitter…
Nice work guys. I like the simplicity of the interface, and the logo looks cool. Posterous = post-it. Very catchy. =)
Loving this!
http://www.thws.cn/articles/po.....email.html
@59, @60: Email is the way everyone knows how to communicate and share files. If I go on vacation and download my photos into Picasa, iPhone, Lightroom, etc, every one of these apps has an email button built into it.
So I take a trip, download 50 photos to my computer, select all, hit email, hit send. And I have a 50 photo image gallery up in seconds (well, upload time).
Try posting 50 photos with any other service and you’ll see why email does make this service much more usable than the usual suspects.
Mike
the comment via email thing has been part of the YC company Disqus since last August. If you added Disqus to Techcrunch, you could have it today.
Postereous sounds great. If it’s like Tumblr, Twitter, and disqus, then I am sure I’ll love it.
Fred
“Posterous also has comments on posts, something Tumblr is just starting to roll out to some users.”
I haven’t seen comments on Tumbr (by Tumblr itself, not Disqus or other). Can anyone point to a blog that has them?
Can you make it so that images get posted to a flickr account also? Or even post a link to a twitter account (I’m using a wordpress plugin that does this right now)
What if you are not in control of the return email address. Say, there’s some web application that says, click here to email this picture to a friend. If there was some secret password you could put in the subject maybe that could be used to route something to a specific posterous account?
easy to get around the spoofing problem just let the user choose a pin and put it in the subject line and then remove it before posting.
Buh. I don’t understand this optimisic comments. I think that if Tumblr goes more mobile (and add the email feature), Posterous died.
We did the same at http://www.2pad.com 6 montha ago ;you send a photo or video 2pad@2pad.com and automaticly you have your own gallery with the email comments.
But Techcrunch team never wrote about it !
@69 that’s because the creator of posterous works for apple.
In a vast sea of copycats and wannabes, finally a truly innovative startup!
Bravo and good luck to them!
@69,
TC is run and authored by the man. Take a look at the backgrounds of the writers here.
I am also adding email functionality to my website now, but that’s besides the point.
@69,
I’ve solved the TC problem. TC does have a sister site which lets you write your own articles but they are not featured.
I have taken out the domain TECHLUSIVE.COM and will put a word press blog there open to the public. I will then drive traffic to it. You may write about your own company there in about 30 minutes after I set it up.
“folks at blogger et al must be banging their heads about now.”
Probably not, Blogger added this feature in May 2005. Just send an email to go@blogger.com or their shortcode BLOGGR. They even have a neat theme song:
http://www.blogger.com/mobile-start.g
I bet Techcrunch could get a hold of someone on the Blogger team to get some background.
@74
‘Probably not, Blogger added this feature in May 2005.’
This looks like a mobile-only solution or maybe i’m missing something…most people dont know how to send text from there mobile let alone use the email funtion.
I think some people are missing the point here.
The main idea with Posterous is that you don’t have to sign up for an *account*. Just by emailing to the address, your blog is created. Not just a post (like a lot of the other sites mentioned here), an entire blog.
I think it’s brilliant, the smoothest sign up process I’ve seen. Good job, guys. I look forward to seeing what you do with this.
Hmm, I commented too soon, it’s true that just emailing to blogger automatically sets up a new blog.
That’s a pretty cool feature I didn’t know about. I still like the way Posterous brings it front and center. I’ll be interested to see how they do…
Not a unique service, but the interface is the simplest I’ve ever seen on anything online.
After looking through their site, it reminds me of Chyrp.net. The CMS is very simple, and extensible through modules.
not a new idea
soup.io is much better
http://soup.io/
@fred wilson: “If you added Disqus to Techcrunch, you could have it today.”
And he’d also lose all the SEO juice he gets from comments. I doubt Mike wants to see a drop in his revenues.
I love it! It’s so simple, go Posterous!!
Posterous is bringing down the barriers to getting started blogging. Beyond that, how they build out their features may be similar or the same as other blogging platforms but having a blogging platform that is disgustingly easy to start using right away is valuable.
The trolling, bad attitude comments are so obnoxious. Occasionally, they make me laugh. For god’s sakes, Posterous is a brand spanking new web app! What did you expect? A replica of WordPress or Drupal in a month or two? Of course not. Give these guys time, they can innovate and impress.
I finally got posterous beat
http://www.sitespaces.net/index.php?join
I have been using MessageDance for a bit
MessageDance requires username/ password! I’ve said this before (and it’s better to be blunt in the long run, you don’t want to fail): Fuck you
>>>> Yes like everyone they need un/pwd, they are not as slick as posterous, but without un/pwd u open up to lot of fuck ups. simplicity compromised with fuck-ups
-MessageDance doesn’t allow for inline embeds other than pictures (video, audio)
>>> They allow inline embeds of images also. I think they treat any message as email clients treat emails, attached images and inline images. you can have both of them.
-MessageDance doesn’t host anything
>>>> not true , as far as I know they host all your files, So you have your own file repository of photos/videos/audios. I just did View source once and found they store all that on Amazon S3. So they do host your files.
I like their utility part of it, its kick ass , breeze
MessageDance UI sucks , big time posterous UI is better. sexy.
All the best for Posterous and MessageDance guys, as market is quite fucked up and every tom’s-dick-is-harry ’s building web 2.0 startups. May god bless the market. I want some returns on my starbucks stocks, screw everyone else.
It is great to see an Indian as a co founder of a new internet startup.
Hi webmaster!
I love the simple and sweet application!
I found one spoofing problem with posterous. I described it here: -
http://www.bubbling-thoughts.c.....erous.html