Hands on: Posterous simplifies posting to multiple online services

When a top blogger announces, after five successful years, that he's moving onto a "lifestream" service because blogging feels old, people take notice.

Posterous, wrote Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel about his new platform of choice, "continues to get insanely useful." Being somewhat addicted to finding cool apps, I was intrigued enough to sign up.

What is it? Whether for business or personal reasons (or both), if you become engaged in the social media world, you quickly discover that it can take a lot of time. A blog. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Flickr. If you also happen to, oh, have a day job, the constant nourishing of all that social media -- currently known as a lifestream -- can get overwhelming.

Posterous allows you to easily post items to your Posterous page and other social media services simultaneously -- all via one e-mail or text message. No desktop app or Web content management system log-in is needed. The post can contain photos, audio and video as well as text.

Posterous isn't meant to help you keep track of everyone else's info, but it will make it simpler to update the burgeoning list of social media sites where you have a presence.

How does it work? With one e-mail you can publish to multiple services -- plus have your own blog-like presence at a free posterous.com site. That page can be public or password-protected.

Based on how you address your e-mail, your posts will go to the Posterous site only or to Posterous and some or all of the services you registered. For example, addressing an e-mail to facebook+twitter@posterous.com will send the message only to your Facebook and Twitter accounts plus Posterous, no matter how many other services are registered to your account. Sending the e-mail to post@posterous.com will send the message to all your services.

If you've got multiple accounts on a service -- for example, two blogs at Blogger -- you can target a specific one only; for example, sending e-mail to #travelfun@posterous.com would autopost to your Travel Fun blog but not any other registered blog at Blogger. Any attached photos are turned into a mini photo gallery and sent off to photo sites you've registered (such as Flickr or Picasa); your video and audio files are automatically embedded and sent to sharing sites you've registered.

What's cool about it? While some fans talk about Posterous as if it's a service for the post-blogging era, there's actually little difference in what visitors see on a posterous.com page compared to a conventional blogging site. What makes Posterous shine is how simple it is to set up and use, and how it eases the processes of social networking for the author/publisher.

In fact, I can't imagine an easier way to get started publishing a Web site, either individual or group. Registration took about 2 minutes, if you include time to receive and respond to the e-mail verification link. Publishing tools are pulled together elegantly and neatly, giving you a blog-like presentation, multimedia and outbound social media promotion.

You don't need to remember a lengthy string of letters and numbers in an e-mail address in order to post to your blog. Instead, Posterous relies on authenticating your e-mail address, pledging it can spot e-mail spoofing attempts.

This is particularly handy if using Posterous for a group social media effort. Posterous lets you register multiple contributors' e-mail addresses, all of whom can autopublish to your page by e-mailing to the same post@posterous.com address. How Posterous e-mail authentication will hold up to hacking attempts if the site becomes more popular still remains to be seen.

Although you must use Posterous as the host, you can use your own domain without additional charge.

Twenty services are supported so far and Posterous pledges more are on the way. When I submitted a couple of services I use that aren't yet supported (SmugMug and StumbleUpon), as suggested on the site, I received a prompt reply from co-founder Sachin Agarwal saying "these are on the list and we hope to add them soon."

The bookmarklet is particularly elegant, doing things like finding all the embedded videos on a page to let you select one, without you needing to search around for YouTube's sharing code.

Comments allow readers to subscribe to a comment thread whether or not they're logged in (if not logged in, you must confirm your e-mail address before you begin getting notifications).

What needs to be fixed? Technically, the site has almost no visual customization yet, so you're pretty much stuck with their format, layout and color scheme.

Content customization is also an issue if you're taking advantage of Posterous' ability to publish to multiple sites. While it's handy to be able to send one message out to multiple social networking sites, one size doesn't always fit all; different services can have different conventions. By using one e-mail message to post both a blog and to Twitter, for example you either end up missing out on using special Twitter syntax (such as identifying people with @ and subjects with #), or you have an odd-looking blog headline.

And speaking of Twitter -- when posting to Twitter via e-mail, I quickly missed having a counter to check when I'd reached my 140-character limit. A Posterous e-mail to Twitter uses the first 130 characters of the subject as your Tweet, then creates a short URL pointing to the rest of your post on Posterous -- even if the rest is just another word or two. Posterous is not a very good Twitter client for those who like to craft their Tweets with care.

On the long-form side, support for autoposting all the content of your lifestream to other external blogs doesn't make much sense, not when Posterous publishes all your posts to its own site. Perhaps some people want a site aggregating their multiple blogs elsewhere, but I don't see the point in having items from my personal blog about community planning issues mix in with my professional posts about technology.

Final verdict: Posterous has some nice technology for updating multiple social sites with a single e-mail or SMS. It's also an easy-to-use destination for people looking to create a personal or group blog for social networking. However, if you want to drive visitors to an existing site/stream -- or your company's Web site -- Posterous may not be the option for you.

The chief competition in this space seems to be Tumblr, which has been around longer and has more customization options. If you're just looking for a way to post to multiple sites without aggregating those posts in a single place, a service such as Ping.fm might be a better fit. And if you're looking for simpler aggregation without full-length posting capability, you may want to check out something like FriendFeed.

Finally, if you do end up using Posterous, beware of relying on it too much. Using an e-mail client to broadcast out to places like Twitter or Facebook can defeat the whole purposes of social networking, which is to see what others are saying -- and to engage with them -- on each social networking site. Not all the conversation will be taking place on your Posterous page.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.