Posterous is a Tumblr style microblogging platform that defines itself through a perhaps unlikely angle: strong support for email posting.
The Y Combinator startup is all about ease of use. To use, send your post to [email protected]. That’s it, and you can include files, pictures, audio, video and text. Just remember to crop your email signature prior to sending otherwise that gets published as well. You don’t have to register either to start posting, the service generates an automatic URL for you based on your email address. If you want a custom URL, or want to edit your post, you do have to register, but the only two things you have to fill in are email address and password (and password only once).
Michele Martin at Bamboo Project notes that you could use a Posterous blog for a one-sentence professional journal, to share conference sessions as they happen, to send photos or video of an off-site event or problem or to “use it as your back-up brain.”
Off the bat it’s an appealing, well thought out service, that is insanely simple to use. Many might argue that email is dead (and it is for younger people) but this is so easy my mother could use it without any instructions. The flip side: crowded space, established players. I’ve started using Utterz and Tumblr recently to deliver some similar to what Posterous does, although Posterous doesn’t do phone call recording unfortunately.
I know I’m often happy to recommend sites for people to check out, but check this one out by sending an email to [email protected] so you can marvel, at least briefly, in the pure simplicity the folks behind this have come up with.
