4 comments

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  Garry Tan

  11 months ago

  Hey Duncan,
  
  Thanks for your mention on inquisitr, again! And we're delighted to have you as a user too.
  
  Sachin and I have been talking for some time about building a service that we ourselves would use. We want to do the things that most other blog platforms don't think to do-- things that are useful and solve problems for people. Paul Graham talks at length about this in his essay, Be Good (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html). And what this means is building features that are just good and useful for our users, almost in the face of what conventional wisdom would dictate a self-interested rational actor would do.
  
  Here's an example -- why is it that sites like Facebook don't always do comment-replies by email? Replying to an email is the natural response to an email notification about a comment. Either it's hard for them to understand SMTP (something I highly doubt), or they want to drive pageviews and traffic to their websites. At the core of that sort of attitude is not being good -- it's blowing off a no-brainer great feature that users would love just game the system and to juice numbers.
  
  Another example -- we provide zip downloads of content if the user wants to provide it to their friends. If I upload 20 photos of a great day out in SF with family, I want my friends and family to be able to download that content and do whatever they want with it. It's my content, right? Again, we see that most other websites work like heck to prevent people from getting access to their own data like that. You'll be loathe to see a "download this gallery" link from anywhere. Again, to juice the system, and get people coming back.
  
  We don't play that way because we don't think the game should be played that way. What we find is that you can't expect people to switch to posterous overnight. In fact, people have communities built around what they're doing already. We don't believe in forcing you to switch because we want you to stay connected everywhere. I want that, wouldn't you? Whenever you switch services, it's kind of like forcing you to move to a different island. You have to say goodbye to your friends, and that's not being good.
  
  When it comes to being an open provider of a service to all blog platforms, we think it boils down to solving a burning problem that we all face -- that we all find ourselves at one point or another uploading or posting to multiple services. This is just dumb. Use posterous and it's a no-brainer -- one email attachment and you're done.
  
  If we can be useful to someone right now, today, then we want to be useful for them. And they'll tell their non-blogging friends too, so we can get experienced bloggers AND expand the blogging space with first-time bloggers at the same time.
  
  Finally, we're working hard to get better every single day... so at some point, it'll be crazy for you not to switch. =)
  
  Thanks for reading a long response, and for using posterous!
  -Garry, cofounder, posterous.com
  
  PS, My cofounder Sachin also blogged about this on his posterous prior to the article but everything he says is totally applicable: Why we did it (http://sachin.posterous.com/autopost-to-everyth...)
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• 

  imog

  9 months ago

  I'm a sucker for idealism, and I like the outlook above. "Be Good"... It's like a positive spinoff of Goog's "don't be evil".
  
  I don't really use twitter, and I never saw the value in it from the start - when your scoble or laporte sure, but for the rest of folks theres just a lot of minutiae mostly.
  
  Posterouson the other hand, I've already picked up and I like its features - I haven't gotten much use out of it yet, but I have plans for it. I like what your doing, and I like being inspired by people with vision. It sounds like Garry and Sachin have it.
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• 

  Tester

  11 months ago

  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I'd say Posterous is smart to stick to building one feature- email posting. This update attempts to drive the same rich content to other sites via email submission? That's a value add. Every feature is a portfolio item with a one-track mind. MT, Blogger and WP all have better plug-ins, widgets, editors, templates, and sidebars. Posterous would be crazy to try to be the newest and greatest blog platform. Instead they are building a the greatest "email submission interpreter"... hoping someone will buy it. Exit and out. Seems straight forward.
  
  My beef is that Blogger and others still have richer email experience in some ways, since you can send to a unique "To" address, thus not limiting your posts to one Blogger account per email address.
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• 

  svartling

  11 months ago

  What posterous needs to do right now, is to let the users customize their themes. Right now every posterous blog look the same. This is probably one reason why many users stick with Tumblr instead.
  
  But I think they will add the custom design feature as a "Pro" feature...
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