'Net Features : Posterous

Conversations, Content & Curation - Twitter Acquires Posterous

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:27:00 GMT

In March 2011, Website Magazine published an article on blogging and social sharing platform Posterous. I knew at the time that Posterous could not stay indepedent for long, and based on news coming out today, I was right.

Twitter officially announced it has acquired Posterous. As many will suggest in the coming hours, days and weeks, this may just be a "talent" acquisition, but look a little deeper and you'll find reason enough to believe that Twitter is getting ready for a very big, very social fight. It's about to move from providing a platform which hosts conversations alone, to one that helps users manage conversations, as well as produce and curate content. That's a better (more appealing) product for users - and investors - in my opinion.

What likely made Posterous so appealing to Twitter is functionality that enables users to host a more familiar, more traditional presence on the Web - or anywhere for that matter. Twitter's problem so far as I see it is that it bleeds users. Do want to see a video? You're off to YouTube. How about an image? There you go towards Instagram or one of the many other Twitter-friendly image hosting services. Twitter has developed some features that counter that but not entirely. Everything changes with the ownership of Posterous however.

Couple the Posterous acquisition with a recently released advertising product and a desire/need to compete with more robust social networks (we're looking at you Google+ and Facebook) and Twitter may have just bought its way back into contention. Too little, too late? Perhaps, but a smart acquisition all the same.

Posterous indicated that its service will stay up and running and that it will notify users if and when they begin to change the service.

Posterous Spaces Makes Private Sharing Easier

Michael Garrity — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Blogging-based social network Posterous is taking a page out of Google+'s book with the launch of Posterous Spaces, which offers users more control and simplicity for selective sharing.

These new intuitive privacy controls will allow a user to accommodate the full range of groups in his or her life, such as friends, family, colleagues and others online. The company claims that this will help prevent those "oops" sharing moments where users accidently make public information or content that they want to be private.

Prosterous saw that private group sharing on the site was growing three time as fast as public sharing, and they attributed that to the recent focus on privacy across all social networks. They saw the demand for features that foster selective sharing and took the opportunity to create Posterous Spaces.

Some of the new features include:

- Full sharing control: Posterous Spaces makes it super easy to expand privacy settings and posting options. Managing multiple Spaces can be done from a single dashboard that provides full control over who can see each post. Posts can be shared with a select few individuals or broadcast widely via auto-posting, which reaches 26 services including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others.

- Permanence: As opposed to a fast-moving stream like many social networking services, Posterous Spaces has a permanent archine of all of your posts and photos for everyone in your Space to enjoy or re-visit at any time.

- Customization: Each user can make his or her Space unique by customizing it's look and feel, as well as linking it to their domain for free.

"Social networks are now embedded in our daily routine, but it's harder to control who sees what you share online and it's forcing us to share less than we'd like," says Posterous founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal, "As a result, mainstream private sharing is still stuck in the inbox,"

A Sharp New Blogging Service From Posterous

Linc Wonham — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:54:00 GMT

Posterous has unveiled an impressive new version of its blogging service, the completely revamped Post Editor 2.0. Like the original, the upgraded platform is designed for simple content management and multimedia sharing, but it's far more sophisticated and flexible than its E-mail-based predecessor.

Posterous users can now upload and arrange any combination of photos, music, videos and documents in their posts, and the redesigned editor includes a dedicated section to batch-upload any media. Uploaded images can be grouped in galleries, reordered via drag-and-drop, rotated, deleted or interspersed with text. Users can now post at any time via the Web by clicking "Post by Web" on the Manage page.