Site Review: Posterous

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Need a simple site that can be updated easily with email and doesn’t require hours to setup? Posterous may be for you.

Posterous is a site similar to Tumblr but is meant to hold longer and more detailed posts. It is a quick post micro blogging site that combines the ease of Twitter with the blogging style of WordPress or a similar platform. Your primary update tool is not a separate application or a website.  Instead Posterous relies on something you use several times a day – your email.  You simply email Posterous your post, Picture,MP3, or Video, and the site takes care of any conversions and posts to your site. 

Setup is as simple as sending an email.  You are then provided a link to a page that allows you to enter a password as well as a custom sub-domain (i.e. user name.  For example, mine is http://AndyG1128.posterous.com) From there, you can customize your settings, add other posters/contributors to your site, and specify whether you want to make the site private or leave it public.  Another interesting feature is the ability to connect to your Twitter and Flickr accounts to allow cross-posting and single upload of photos and videos.  the idea is you email the files to Posterous and they then forward the pictures, etc to your Flickr account and send an update to Twitter alerting your friends you’ve made a new post.  One other interesting feature is the ability to setup multiple sites.  Normally, to setup separate pages on sites such as this, you need to have multiple accounts. Posterous steps around this and allows you to have multiple sites with different names and manage them all from one account.  This makes it easy to setup a private site for family or special friends and, at the same time, maintain a public presence.  This is a nice idea I may use to keep family updated on life events.

Their Terms of Service are better than most sites in that they do not attempt to assume ownership of your content or force you into releasing your content under a Creative Commons Share and Share Alike type of license instead of respecting your personal copyright. (Tumblr has been moving that way and some microblogs like identi.ca force you to agree to give people the right to re-purpose or remix your copy for non-commercial use as long as they attribute you) The setup and use are simpler than most and the themes they offer allow the site to look like a full self-hosted blog. Auto-posting to other services is a relatively new function of these sites in a bid to keep you on their service and to draw traffic to them. This works pretty well, especially if you don’t use those services regularly. Personally, cross-posting works for me, but I end up in a feedback loop if I am not careful (see my blog post here to see how I embarrassed myself that way.)

All in all, it’s a pretty good site for ease of use and to use as a quick post that can then be sent to other services for you.  If you need this kind of service, I think you won’t go wrong using them.  I personally will probably move away from Tumblr to this site, simply for it’s ease of use.  As I use the site more, I will post a follow-up here.  What about you?  Do you think this kind of site is good for the casual blogger or is it a waste of bandwidth?

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