Posterous.com (YC Summer 08) launches Autopost to all major blog platforms | Hacker News Reader

Posterous.com (YC Summer 08) launches Autopost to all major blog platforms

blog.posterous.com

56 pointsrantfoil29 comments

There should not be two exactly same posts on the web. Put it in another way, all posts on the internet should be distinct.

In an ideal world, we agree. However, in practice, it's just a part of the fragmented web world we live in right now.

Communities of people spring up all over the place, and a problem we have today is sometimes you do just want to get something everywhere, without posting multiple times. I might have a community on Twitter, Flickr, Xanga and Blogger... today I have to log in and post something 4 times. Or, post once by email from my posterous.

I think that's valuable, at least for me. But judging from our feedback from our users so far, they agree too. And as a startup, that's what counts.

What about having an option to not post it on Posterous? I know it seems somewhat counter intuitive to the interests of Posterous, but the email "interface" is so much better than most of what's out there for simple posts.

I imagine only a minority of users will not have these type of posts sent to Posterous. Additionally, once you're able to have Posterous on your own domain, many users will make the switch entirely.

I'm a big fan of allowing people to post in multiple places. Especially when you're talking about flickr and/or Twitter which serve different uses than a blog might.

I think the primary thing I want to make me feel better about Posterous is some control (even if it's just a raw CSS editor) to make my Posterous page look better. Currently it feels like it's the bare minimum and it's actually somewhat painful to see my content displayed there.

I'd probably have not been as interested in having it pushed elsewhere if it looked better on posterous.

Keep up the good work, though. New feature seems to work like a champ.

Agreed. Angerwhale (my blogging engine) has a feature for transcluding blog posts from other Angerwhale instances. So, if you want to comment on something, you can post a blog entry about it and then transclude the post as a comment. Then the comment thread from your blog becomes a sub-thread in the including blog (and so on recursively). That way, when you comment on a comment, everything ends up in the right place. The original post that everyone is replying to is the canonical source for all replies, regardless of whether or not they are "comments" or other blog posts.

Anyway, this is the Right Way as far as I can tell... but it appears that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world that use Angerwhale. Maybe I should make the mechanism compatible with WordPress or something :)

(BTW, I should mention that I like FriendFeed's solution to this problem better than Posterous'.)

Before they got to alpha, was it called "pre-Posterous?"

What I'd like is a way to unify all of my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter microblogging.

Game changing. If this works, Posterous will be the interface for many many blogs. Trying it on my wordpress blog now...

It worked. Only real problem is there's no way to add categorization and tags. However, the wordpress interface is so buggy and clunky, it might be faster to create via email, email to posterous, then add tags & categories via wordpress.

True that. There is much for us to work on, and tagging is something we do think will be valuable down the road.

This is a great idea. The target market for those who can't see it is - non-technical people. Our parents, siblings and friends... They don't have to deal with some crazy blog interface. They can just use their already familiar email interface and email posts directly to post@posterous.com. And on top of that it integrates with flickr, twitter and legacy blogs.

If you can't see the potential then you are either 1) in a family of all engineers and scientists 2) have no non-technical friends 3) don't see what it can do for YOU... their is a world outside of news.yc.

Interesting how they're posting to Tumblr, their competition.

I guess this shows how much they value openness and user happiness. Well done!

Absolutely agreed. I emailed Gary recently saying that I didn't think Posterous had enough to really compete with Tumblr. But something like this doesn't just change my mind (regarding Tumblr posts, of course) - it's genuinely a very useful feature. Well done.

I think this is great. Very valuable feature that puts them a bit past tumblr in one sense. I like that they're not all about competition, and are giving users tools they want to be happy.

you guys have really taken the "getting better every day" principle to your heart. absolutely fantastic going. keep up the good work!

I may be wrong here . But given a choice of desktop application like Windows Live Writer(yeh windows only); many people would face a question? how does it matter using new web service?

In most of the cases I wont be pushing the same content to multiple blogs at once.

Sending mail is the simplest solution one can see though. Friendfeed-mailFF and now posterous. Also jason calacanis's shifting from blogging to email platform. its all 360 degree cycle.

Are we redefining how to blog ( by mailing either through posterous/way jason calacanis done having exclusive mailing list)?

oops everything is getting redefined

Anecdote: The only THREE people I sent to posterous.com all were somehow totally confused about how to signup.

I had to point out to each of them that it says you don't have to signup.

Really, it's very strange. People are trained to sign-up. It might make sense to change your front page to include a "Sign up now" button that just is a mailto:link or something similar. Maybe with a subject of "No signup is necessary! Just start sending email to posterous and you win."

Who knows-- just some feedback that I often have to talk people through the initial posterous process.

I think the feature is fantastic more because it signals what is going to come. This could be the layman's version of a REST API! Just email to posterous and done! For posting pretty much anything.

I'm not sure who is the market for this, people who want to post the same content on multiple blogs?

Why do they do that? I mean, I have one blog and I post on it. Seven blogs with the same stuff would be crazy. Is RSS so obscure that I have to go around to every community I'm a part of to push my content out to them?

Cool that the users like it - that's all that matters. Could be game-changing for those who participate in multiple communities, right?

I think I get it. Still not sure. Of course, I'm still working on why twitter makes any sense at all. "I'm thinking of going to I-hop" "Scratched my nose just now""Look! A butterfly."

feh

"Is RSS so obscure that I have to go around to every community I'm a part of to push my content out to them?"

Yes.

A lot of my friends - and myself - maintain one blog/journal per community that we're part of. I have a LiveJournal for Harry Potter fandom friends, planWorld for Amherst college friends, FaceBook for high school friends, a blog for Haskell/language-design people, etc. The venue's often determined by the community - almost all of fandom is on LiveJournal, for example, and planWorld is still the journal of choice for Amherst College alums from the classes of 00-07. Most of them rely on cross-posters, because they often have their own external blogs (WordPress, Xanga, MySpace, whatever) for other communities that they're part of.

There's a big world outside of the Silicon Valley techsphere - I'd guess that an order of magnitude more people are on MySpace than even know what RSS is.

"I'm not sure who is the market for this, people who want to post the same content on multiple blogs?"

Spammers?

Artists. Musicians. Anyone who is organizing a group of volunteers who check different blogs. Anyone organizing a party or group outing with a bunch of friends (who won't all have one of those).

I can see a lot of legitimate uses.

Well, aside from cross-blog publishing, I see a lot of benefit to announcing a blog post on Twitter and also store the photo over on Flickr. Those seem like no-brainer features that would be appealing to a lot of people.

If you find yourself doing photo-centric blogging, try OurDoings. Friendfeed will pick up the images from OurDoings as well as the post title.

The market seems to be there. Ping.fm and HelloTxt have active user bases.

Um, I can barely keep up with one blog... who the heck has time to post to more than one?

Best of luck to them, but I'm obviously not the target market!

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned http://ping.fm which seems to do the exact same thing

Ah, but they're a dumb pipe. We actually a) also give you your own blog with blog address, and b) host all your images, video, music and files. =)

I mentioned them and HelloTxt.

awesome feature.

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