The way these guys pump out features, I don't see how any other blogging service can keep up. If other services try to add more engineers it will only slow down their process. Goes to show there's no better way to build a product than with a small group of awesome, dedicated coders.
I think posterous is awesome, and it has become my primary blog, although I don't blog much. That said (and no offense intended), this feature is not exactly groundbreaking. Livejournal, Wordpress, and MoveableType all had stuff like this five years ago, right?
My understanding of how posterous works is to select and implement, cleanly, core functionality in a way that keeps the interface simple. I don't think that posterous out-competes other blog websites (or software) on features.
The most important feature in a blogging platform is the content that's already on it, and in that sense, Posterous still has a lot of catching up to do. More content drives organic growth through links and other SEO mechanisms, which in turn drives more users to sign up.
And when and if you do get that huge growth, all these cool features don't always scale well. I think scaling issues is what really slows down innovation with the big guys.
Posterous does "roll deep" on HN, but I'm also really excited about this feature.
The general blog semantic of visible/invisible is simple but underpowered: there are a lot of things I want to show to one group of people that would just be noise to another group. This sort of feature lets me segregate my output.
Yeah, but at the same time it's weird when you're theming something and you try to use an editor and for video/audio posts you can't actually see what it looks like.
Any tips, since you're one of the big Tumblr stylists? (Also, did your Dadaist theme ever get made public or was that a demo?)
Just theme it as a static html page with 7 sample posts (or 9, if you want to do each quote size differently) and all the proper pagination and everything. Then once it's all ready to go, save a copy of it as a .txt file and add the blocks in. That part honestly takes about 5 minutes.
That's something I wondered, looking at your theme: does Tumblr auto-handle quote sizes? I've never seen it in any CSS file that I've looked at in any of the themes I've sampled: how do you differentiate?
Looks like you don't need a Posterous account to view password-protected content. Just the password. Not true on LiveJournal. (Not a user of either, yet, but this is how things look on inspection. Corrections/amplifications welcomed.)
There are lots of people in my life who I could give a link and a password to, but who I would not ask to make a LiveJournal account.
yeah this was a big deal for us. Most other sites do access through accounts. That stinks. I want to share my family site with my 100 family members. No way they are going to create accounts. But they do know how to type in a password.
Here's an additional use case from my world: I'm in grad school & often want to share data and thoughts with various scientific honchos whose time budgets are very limited.
Now I can cc. a Posterous group called "my advisor might be interested" whenever I send an email. When my advisor gets some downtime, he can check this group out. This lets me communicate in a "non-push" way to him -- I don't clutter his inbox with my email, but I do get to keep him in the loop.
Essentially, this lets me create a "soft" cc. semantic.
I've had this in mind for a while, and made some half-baked efforts to roll my own, but trying out your service will be much easier in the short term.
Shit. I'm now at serious risk of turning into a fanboy.
The only thing that really keeps me from diving in is that my data are owned by someone else. I see I can use it w/ my own domain, which is really cool (http://posterous.com/faq/), but is there any way to import/export data?
My content is precious to me. I don't want to give it to a web startup if I can't get it back.
BUT -- if I post by email, everything I post will be mirrored to my usual email places ...
Leaving only other people's comments on my posts, and submissions to my groups, that I won't be able to archive. (Cue sound of needle scratching across record.)
I can see this might not be a concern for a wide swathe of the potential Posterous user base... but for this prospective user, it matters.
Any plans to implement some data export/migration capabilities, rantfoil?
[edit: maybe there is an option to have other people's comments & posts to my group be forwarded to my email? Don't see it in documentation -- time to make an account & find out if the option is there.]
API's are coming, both for posting and retrieving. It's going to be one of the big tent pole features alongside theming we're excited about in the next few months.
Although there is a difference between exposing API to developers vs. giving users a feature, my "I want to own my data" worries will be greatly assuaged if a good API exists.
Posterous seems like a logical place to add support for webhooks, as an alternative to rss and email. They practically have the whole system already, but in email instead.
