from AngryAussie.wordpress.com

The dream of MyOtter.ca is to help people who might otherwise be lost in the world of social media set themselves up-- whether they be a business, not-for-profit, or otherwise-- with an understandable and manageable way of communicating with their client base. One of the philosophies is that the message is more important than the medium, and as such they should be linked into their target groups wherever that target group happens to be.

However, it would simply be too much to ask that people who are already incredibly busy spend large chunks of time logging onto every social network imaginable to set status updates or blogs. The question of how to receive messages is simple enough; most services allow you to receive an email whenever someone comments on something you've said or sends you a message-- you can then log on and deal with it. What's less apparent is how best to communicate the initial message so that it goes everywhere-- be it a status update, a link, or a full-blown blog. It's possible that Posterous just might be that tool.

A couple of days ago, we would have probably gone with Ping.fm. This is a popular service that can be used to update your status in places like Twitter, MySpace, GoogleTalk, Facebook, LinkedIn, and also gives you the ability to post to your blog-- including links to other media. And on its surface, Posterous doesn't seem to be operating in the same arena, since it's a blogging tool, not status updater. In that sense, it's no more a status updater than any other blog whose feed automatically updates your Twitter account. However, we believe that with a few tweaks it would have the capability to be a direct competitor to Ping.fm.

What's different, though, is the variety of services that Posterous already provides. While it has less in the way of status updaters (no MySpace, LinkedIn, or GTalk) it has a major advantage in its ability to update other types of media, including blogs. While it's true that you can update blogs using Ping.fm, what sets Posterous apart is how you can update them. With Ping.fm, you post a link to a picture, video, or song and the blogging service reads it as a link to a picture, video, or song. Do the same with Posterous, and it is automatically enabled in the post as a picture, video, or song (see the photo below to see what we mean, nevermind that we don't have Flash9 installed on that browser). This makes posterous a much more robust tool for blogging.

However, it also works well for status updates. At first we were annoyed by the fact that we thought if we had any media in our post, it would post an automatic link back to the posterous site and not back to the media, until we realized we could get around this by posting the link in the title. In that case, it makes a simple status update with a bit.ly shortcut linking directly to the media, as seen here.

It is worth noting, though that, ping.fm does the same using its own shortcuts, and does it better when the same message is sent to blogs. When you use the link-in-title method for posterous, you wind up with something like this, while ping.fm, even to posterous, just gives you a nice, tidy link. 

So that combined with support for more services (MySpace, Google, et al) does give Ping.fm a leg up over Posterous when it comes to status updates, but Posterous could remove both these advantages with just a couple of tweaks. And since it already has a far more robust blogging template, more flexibility with email posting (you can clarify exactly which services you want your post to go to with different addresses, while Ping.fm gives you only one address)  YouTube support (something notably lacking from Ping.fm) and what we would say is superior harmonization with Flickr/Picasa, it may not be long before it completely takes over as a status-updater client.

But Can You Blog?: 

There has been some discussion over Posterous as a short-form blogging platform ala Tumblr, and even as a blogging client, period. While we can see the arguments in favour of Posterous (ease of use, auto-updating other services), we have to say there is still a lot of room for it to grow before it can become a full-grown blogging service. For example, we started to write this post on the Posterous website, but when it came time to upload the photo, we realized there was no way to do it without first uploading to another client and then plugging in the link. Not wanting to do that, we moved to email, where we have no control over where the photo goes-- we can change it later, but only after its been posted). This is a minor quibble, but not something we would have to deal with in Blogger, Wordpress, or Tumblr. There's also no way to preview your blog post without posting it, which can be an annoyance to people wanting to get into the HTML a little bit more.

Second is the lack of customization, up to and including the lack of support for third-party comment systems. Obviously this is going to change at some point, as the Posterous team has been hinting everywhere it's been said, but until it does, there is a good reason to stick with a blog if you're wanting to convey a specific feel. Of course, this may be a moot point as more and more people see things in feed readers or via Twitter, but for many, it is a deal breaker.

Finally, there's the fact that (at the moment) Posterous can only really work as a status updater, or a blog, but not both. This is working under the assumption that you don't put every single Tweet, photo, and link that you make up on your blog, but instead leave it for more substantial pieces of work. Again, this is something that might be solvable through some tweaks (such as doing as chi.mp has done and create different streams of the same content and giving visitors the ability to choose a single service to view), but until it happens, there's still, in our minds, a reason to stick with another blogging platform. It should be said, though, that if you were to start all your interactions on Posterous, it could act as a service similar to FriendFeed, minus the notifications of what you did through other clients (another possible tweak?).

Conclusion:

Depending on which way and how quickly Posterous grows, it could wind up being the major player in either the status updating or blogging fields, and possibly both. At the moment, we view it as a great way to populate your sites, including your blogs, all from one dashboard-- or from your inbox, as the case may be. However, as a destination for readers who don't want to see every single thing coming out of your stream, it would be best to stick with an exterior blog, as well-- even if all its content comes from Posterous.

contact@myotter.ca

Ping.fm to posterous... http://ping.fm/57OBi

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