Posterous Unveils Pages | Hacker News Reader

Posterous Unveils Pages

blog.posterous.com

51 pointsbradgessler25 comments

Does every feature that posterous releases make it to the front page of HN? I mean, pages, it's not some super innovative new feature. Every friggin blog platform on the planet has the ability to create pages.

How is this newsworthy and why are people up-voting it?

Especially considering that tumblr (I see tumblr and posterous as competitors) has had pages for some time now.

I have to question your reasons for making a stand just now on the re-implementation of standard website features throughout the proliferation of diverse web publishing systems. It's been quite a ride since the first CMSs decades ago but the scenery has been much the same, you must admit.

You can claim that the release of standard CMS features by one company or another is not newsworthy (which is why we have the little arrow over there by the link) but I'd then submit that most developments by technology companies (large and small) are less then entirely novel. If those developments are deemed not-news-worthy, HN will have even less to do with the activities of entrepreneurial operations.

Well last week we had a post about posterous adding markdown and syntax-highlighting and it got 99 points on the front-page. Now we have this post, about them adding the ability to create pages, on the front-page with 17 points after 1 hour.

I might be interested in hearing about major or innovative new features at posterous but these seem to me to be fairly standard features for a blogging platform and thus not very newsworthy. We don't get front-page stories every time wordpress or tumblr add a new minor feature.

So why are people upvoting this? Is it people who are posterous users and who are upvoting it as a sign of approval? Or people who want to show their support for posterous because they're a YC company. Or are there people who genuinely think that the fact that a blogging app now lets you create a page is really interesting tech news.

I'm pretty sure submissions about YC funded companies are juiced.

Keep in mind that there are 400+ YC founders out there now, and we roll deep. A lot of us do keep tabs on Hacker News and we do vote up and support our friends.

So no juice needed. Just regular voting.

I'm not familiar with the term 'juice' but I think you admitted to what the GP was in spirit complaining about. I recognize there isn't any ill will here, and you're only naturally supporting your friends (of which you have more than most folks on HN), but this isn't very different from a voting ring on Digg.

I'm not complaining coz I'd do the same if I was in YC. HN is just like TechCrunch in that YC startups 'unfairly' get more exposure than non-YC ones. Building unfair advantages is essential to startup success.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing unfair going on here. This is news.ycombinator.com and people who come here care about ycombinator companies. The YC related posts aren't bigger or any different from others and I think they are submitted the same way.

It's not YC doing anything, just us the audience clicking on the arrows.

I wasn't complaining. I enjoy this place a ton, but it's pretty obvious when a 20 minute old submission has 80 votes for it and zero comments. [citation needed]

It may not be interesting tech news but it is tech news relevant to the interests of those paying attention to the activities of startups.

I can't wait for the next headline:

Posterous Reveals Radical New Feature: FRAMES!

Seems like they are actually following the mantra of releasing a dead simply product quickly, and the slowly adding more features so that in the end, the users might as well have signed up for WordPress or Tumblr or similar sites in the beginning. Clever.

I understand that Posterous's "Pages" is a feature, not a product. However, it unpleasantly reminds me of two products named Pages, Facebook Pages and Apple Pages.

There have been several times this year where I was searching for answers to questions about Pages, and it was a miserable experience. In part, it was due to the confusion between Facebook Profiles and Facebook Pages, but it was still miserable.

Now I am inherently biased against naming a feature or product Pages. It's tricky w/ features, because you want it simple yet distinct,. Unfortunately, the trend is heading towards the "The" and "A".

Using a generic name for a product sucks in general in terms of finding information about it. People don't tend to say "Apple Pages" in every reference to the app. "Windows" is an exception because it was huge before the idea of Web search hit the mainstream ;-)

I dig Posterous... but I cannot see the difference between Posterous and WordPress. Can someone help point that out?

You can't host your own Posterous and it has fewer features and no third party plugins but it's easier to use, has built in syndication to TwitFace, and is probably far more secure than WordPress.

(Edit: How is this wrong? Was it my playful nickname for Twitter and Facebook collectively?)

I'm surprised you said "Posterous and WordPress" and not "Posterous and Tumblr", since I see more similarity in the latter.

Regardless, I think Posterous boasts simplicity over WordPress.

A standard WordPress install starts you off with 7 different active widgets. There are thousands of WordPress plugins to do thousands of things.

Posterous is an example of "less is more", in my opinion.

I'm much more likely to read a Posterous blog(with standard themeing) all the way to the end than I am most WordPress blogs.

I think the Posterous/Tumblr dichotomy is a false one. Where they're both ultra-simple microblogging platforms, tumblr is easily more community centric, insular in focus than Posterous, and in my opinion that's where it's strength is.

Nearly every avenue of a default feature now found in tumblr has come from innovation that users have made use of when the site was still young and lacked considerable features.

The difference is obvious: Posterous lets you post anything from anywhere, and they host it for you with zero setup. Of course the key feature for its success is email posting!

It's funny because email is how I started using Posterous. I thought the getting started process was clever. Over time, I started using the bookmarklet more and more. After a year, I would say I use the email feature extremely rarely.

This.

Plus the easy reposting to so many other services. I really like that Posterous can repost to not just Twitter, but Identi.ca, FriendFeed, and Jaiku. And Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and every other blog site. And Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Flickr and every other media site.

Etc. etc... The autopost feature + post by email is the dog's bollocks.

One has an elite startup feel, and the other is a platform for "normal" people that just happens to have a popular open source version that you can install on your own server.

Posterous is all about posting content via Email. WordPress is more about posting content via a web editor interface.

Read http://posterous.com/faq for details on what you can do with an email post on Posterous.

Actually, Posterous has a web editor that's super powerful and easy to use. You can post all content including media without using email if you want

I thought only Apple got PR with incremental updates.

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