Has Anyone Tried Posterous Yet?

I am probably very late to the Posterous party, and everybody already knows everything there is to know about it; but still I need to think through Posterous out loud and hopefully, you guys can tolerate my rambling on about yet another blogging/social networking tool.

So, what is posterous? It is apparently the "simplest, easiest, and fastest way for anyone in the known universe to become a blogger, a journalist, a lifestreamer".

If you can send an email, you can create a Posterous blog. That’s because that’s the way you blog – you simply send an email to post [at] posterous.com. Your email gets posted, and you get a dedicated URL for all your thoughts – often yourname.posterous.com.

Sounds good?

Well, in addition to creating the blog post for you, Posterous will automatically update things like your Facebook status, your Twitter status, your other blogs, or even an iTunes podcast, every time you email Posterous (depending on the settings you have configured).

I did some more investigation and found out that this could be the perfect tool for a lazy blogger like me. I could send Posterous any kind of attachment and they will format it appropriately and post it to my Posterous page. They accept *.doc, ppt, pdf, jpg, gif, png, mp3, avi, and mpg formats. 

So, based on all that I read, I decided to start a Posterous presence. I don’t want to use the term blog, because well even though it is a kind of a blog, I am still not very sure what I”ll actually use this page for.

After setting everything up, I sent out a mail to Posterous with a bunch of photos, and this is what they created for me: http://booksandmore.posterous.com/lunch-at-serengeti – a very nice little slideshow. This is incredibly efficient. It took me just 2 mins to mail these photos before they were up on the site. I don’t have to fill up dreary forms, no long uploads, no signing in …nothing. I just have to attach photos to my GMail account and hit Send. How easy is that?

After seeing this, I am quite inspired to use this site to post all family photos, and videos. I do wish I had thought to give a different name to my Posterous space though, because as of now, I am not really planning to post anything books related there. I don’t plan to change the name now though. My tool loyalties are so fleeting that I am never sure whether I am going to use anything long enough for it to be worth the effort of configuring it. If I am still using Posterous a month from now, I will definitely try playing around more with it.

Because Posterous can even publish stuff to my WordPress blog I am definitely going to give that a whirl, starting with this post. Let’s see how it displays.

If it is good, I could continue using it to post to my WordPress blog, which is always slow at the best of times, and impossible at its worst!

Mom, in case you are reading this post, you can check out my posterous link this weekend. I will be uploading tons more photos there 🙂

Test Results :): If I include the body of the text within the email, Posterous formats it beautifully and uploads it here (much faster than doing it via WordPress itself). However, I did need to log in to WordPress to add tags, categories, and create the slug (but it is still quicker because you can use WordPress Quick Edit facility).

I need to do another post with images, and see how it displays.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with how quickly Posterous publishes. I do wish there was some way for me to specify the tags and categories within the email, so that it makes it even quicker for me.

I also do wish there was some way to automate the “digg” and “Share” links that I add at the bottom of my posts. Sigh! things would be just dandy then!