Posterous, a new lifestream/blogging platform, has been gaining a little traction of late. I first heard of it from Neville Hobson, then James Dellow moved his blog from Blogger to Posterous.
The big thing with this new platform/service is that you send any and all content - text, photos, video, links etc. - by email.
Posterous is designed to be super-easy, and it is. You don't even need to 'sign up' to create your own Posterous, you just email your first post and start from there - you have a website. Instantly. For Free. Very clever.
But... emailing blog posts is not new. Typepad (which this blog runs on) has offered that service for quite a long time. It's a bit clunky, though, and you have to use a 'secret email address', and the formatting can go very wrong.
Posterous has been designed from the start to handle emailed posts, so it works much better. For example, if you email a load of photos, it resizes them automatically and creates a beautiful looking gallery. Again, very clever (and their spam filters must be VERY clever).
You also get the sense that Posterous is aiming to make this a mix of long-form Twitter and long form del.ici.ous, and long form Flickr. It's an interesting concept given the evolution of social media. It's like we're reversing and picking ideas up from services that have long since settled down, remixing them into something new. It seems there are people working on services to fill every single niché in social media.
So, what to make of Posterous? Well, I learned a long time ago that with social media tools and services, as much as 'it makes no sense at all' and you end up thinking, 'why the hell would I use that', you really should hold judgement until you've tried it. Initially it looks very smart, very minimal, and the emailing workflow is a breeze. Definitely worth pursuing for a moment.
Thus, a new Posterous account is at alexmanchester.posterous.com.
As I've written there, let's see what we can see...
