DISQUS

Ahad Bokhari · 3 months ago

True, i started using Posterous after checking out Steve Rubel numerous times on his Posterous page. Dirt simple and very convenient! Ya know i got to know the crew and niche over at Hacker News, incredible site.. Cheers for the post...

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Thank you. There is some great content being created on Posterous. I've been enjoying it over there as well.

DarrenRHill · 3 months ago

Good clarity on the differences there, the visual makes things nice and clear. And I agree with what you say, although I am pretty new to the whole lifestreaming thing.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

I was hoping the visual would bring clarity. Glad you liked it.

Rahsheen · 3 months ago

Definitely agree, Mark. Even though I have all my services connected six ways from sunday, FriendFeed is still the closest thing I have to a real lifestream. I love my Posterous blog. It provides an outlet to post things that have no reason to be on my actual blog. It's quite far from being a lifestream, though.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Haha, love your comment "I have all my services connected six ways from sunday". Yea, I'm not too sure if aggregation of services should be incorporated into Posterous. If it is, perhaps they can segregate those items separately from Posterous posts if that makes sense.

Charles · 2 weeks ago

I need the import funcationality. Flickr is a big part of what I do. Posterous doesn't allow me the control I need when posting there. With tools like Lightroom 3 integrating so closely with Flickr that's what I'll be using to post there. As cool as posterous is, if I can't import those photos into it, it's mostly worthless to me. I can't figure out how I'd use it. Maybe they can just pick select services. No rss feeds. And if they import something like Twitter, filter out @ replies and retweets.

I'd really live it if they could import my Twitter then push the photo back out to a couple other blogs including posterous of course.

crabasa · 3 months ago

I completely agree. As much as I admire the product that the Postereous team has put together, I am totally baffled by the concept that it could act as a suitable replacement to FriendFeed.

Chris Baskind · 3 months ago

Oh, I dunno. Postereous could easily replace Friendfeed as it is currently used by most of the people I follow. That's as a discussion board -- not an aggregator.

FF moved from emphasizing lifestreaming to "conversation" as soon as it went with realtime. Most links I see in my stream are shared directly or are topics original to FF. Postereous can certainly handle that, particularly if it improves the robustness of its comment system or allows users to move to Echo or DISQUS.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

As far as I'm concerned FriendFeed has always been about sharing content (either posted natively or imported from a service) and the conversations that are generated around that content. I think that there are many great conversations that are generated around content imported by 3rd party services on FriendFeed, most notably Twitter, that just couldn't happen on Posterous as the service stands right now. I don't think considering Posterous as a replacement to FriendFeed is really valid as I see them as different beasts.

Tal Shafik · 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure this is a fault in (or personal take on) terminology. When Rubel says Lifestreaming, he means the quick and painless method Posterous uses to post, Email, which can be accessed from just about anywhere. This leads to much more sharing. I don't think he ever meant "Lifestream" as an aggregation solution.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Tal, while I agree with your assertion on what Steve intended, the perception from what I've read on the web with regards to people's interpretation is far different. My goal was to somehow shed a little light and clarify things with this post.

micahwittman · 3 months ago

I use my self-hosted WP blog for my project info and long-form expressions; short to medium length more light-hearted, but generaly not silly, original content on Posterous; and the ephemeral stuff just goes direct to Friendfeed.

Also, I joined as a contributor on a group blog, http://allwordyandjunk.blogspot.com (populated by Friendfeed alumni), to which I selectively cross-post from either WP or Posterous.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Thanks for the insight Micah. It's always interesting to hear the way others determine what content to flow to various channels and services.

bertilhatt · 3 months ago

I like the distinction, and the conclusion from the butterfly-shape that we need not a beam-this-up service, neither a show-it-to the world, but some intermediary to tie them all together—an hourglass.

I'd like this service to be intelligent, able to tell apart my different contexts based on a wide varieties of clues (language, type of document, semantic analysis, etc.) So far, Posterous is the opposite: it merges everything, so no up-loader organises things so well; as few services allow me to filter the news (Tech news from Marc Canter) from the noise (Marc talks about his children) I'm left with a mash. It has been concerning since Facebook opened outside US-colleges (Drunk alumni vs. Co-workers) and it is still unresolved: no twitter client allows you to filter-*out* a hash-tag, the promissed Facebook “Share that link to a group only” never came. . .

We can be forced to let go, and grant our family access to our tennis club photos — but lack of relevance will get the better of us, soon.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Your thoughts on the ability to filter on a per service basis bring up issues I've heard others discuss as well. Usually as it pertains to taming the firehose. I think the next phase of Lifestreaming will be the creation of intelligent algorithms that analyze the massive amount of data we are creating and add some features around it. I already could see that an intelligent recommendation engine for products and services could be built around my social graph...and even be geo specific. But one to automatically filter noise based on content determination will be a bit trickier.

bertilhatt · 3 months ago

Simply encourage people to upvote comments and include some collaborative filtering first. From there, you can scale up to learning algos, or use it as a base for semantic fine-tuning.

Chuck Falzone · 3 months ago

This piece totally nails the trouble I've had in grokking Posterous. I kept hearing "it's great for lifestreaming!" and just couldn't find anything there that looked like lifestreaming to me...because I had the first model in mind.

I appreciate Posterous' features, but don't like the way it inserts itself in the middle of everything. I'm just more comfortable with the first model.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

Thanks Chuck and glad you liked it. My goal was both to explain to people who understood the original Lifestreaming model of aggregating services to those considering and confused by the role Posterous played, as well as educating people that hadn't heard of Lifestreaming to understand the differences.

Kingsley Joseph · 3 months ago

The end result is the same. What am I missing?

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

I'm not sure what you mean by end result but the first method allows importing from a limitless number of 3rd party services that offer an RSS feed while the second requires you to post everything yourself using 3 defined methods. Hope that helps.

Mahendra · 3 months ago

Thanks for clearing the confusion folks might have had with 'Posterous for Lifestreaming'.

Mark Krynsky · 3 months ago

You're welcome, but I'm sure some will still have questions as it can still be a little difficult to grasp.

Eric Matas · 3 months ago

Great visual to clarify Posterous v Lifestream. Didn't really need another, but I did it: http://ericmatas.posterous.com is live. Oy.

getGlue · 3 months ago

Glue has a very similar service as well and is currently in Beta. We're releasing some pro services in early 2010. This includes the ability to share images, audio, video and text content across all your sites and networks.

Glue publishes to: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Virb, Posterous, LiveJournal, Blogger, PureVolume, Wordpress, iLike, Tumblr, RSS, Flash Widget and Custom Javascript & PHP feeds.

We're adding new features weekly based on user feedback. So if there's something you're looking for let us know and we'll see if we can't help you out.

- Jordan

http://Glue.gs

phildunn · 3 months ago

"don't like the way it inserts itself in the middle of everything" (falzone). This is my major beef with Posterous. My process seeks to share content and conversations seamlessly. Posterous takes links I share from the bookmarklet then hyperlinks them to my Posterous feed instead of the original article. That blows, IMHO. It's a little scammy. Strange how it grabs the image, too. It makes my Facebook people jump through too many hoops to see the content, for example. I realize that a direct link would cut Posterous out of the eyeballs loop, but it doesn't suit my needs for a lot of different content sharing activities.

Mahendra · 3 months ago

phildunn,

For content sharing, you might want to check out http://sharein.com.

phildunn · 3 months ago

Nice - I will give this a whirl. Thanks!

phildunn · 3 months ago

One drawback that I can see immediately is that you have to duplicate your efforts to post to both Twitter and Facebook. Is there a way to post to both in the settings?

Mahendra · 3 months ago

None that I know of, yet. I found this: http://help.sharein.com/discussions/feedback/30...

phildunn · 3 months ago

ah -good stuff. Glad to see they're working on it. Another thing, which I'll post to that thread, too.. is that some of my facebook folks have wondered wy sharein links do not launch a new browser tab. minor point IMO, but relevant to some.

Mahendra · 3 months ago

Interesting. Thanks for letting me know!

ileane · 1 month ago

Mark, There are so many aspects of this new Web 2.0 that I don't think there is enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. You have done an excellent job of helping me understand Postereous and the concept of lifestreaming. And it is an added bonus for me that you mentioned aspects of Tumblr as well.
I have a Postereous blog but I am not really sure if I need it, since my primary blog is with WordPress.com. I went to Diigo (a bookmarking service that I absolutely love using to build my Personal Learning Network - PLN) to search for Postereous and found nothing. So I added this article (which I found on Google) and now it is being shared with the rest of the Diigo community.

Thank you for this very insightful post.

Mark Krynsky · 1 month ago

Ileane, thank you for the kind words and sharing the story.

Makurrah · 1 week ago

Just tracked down this post, which is highly lucid as well as practical. I'm currently using Posterous as a running gloss or set of marginalia on my 'macro' blog on TypePad. I appreciate your input and will track you blog going forward.

Ben Mason · 4 days ago

Mark,
Brilliant post. I came across this searching for a way to import an RSS feed into Posterous. I'm new to the terminology, but your concepts hit the nail on the head. I now understand that I've been trying to use Posterous as both a lifestreaming aggregator and a broadcaster! Like you said, it's really only designed to broadcast, but I've been trying to get more out of it -- and it's really a pain! You said that there are many other options for lifestreaming. Which services are the best to use in your opinion? What can best capture all my activities across the web automatically, and at the same time be a service to keep me connected across my several social networks by cross-updating?
Thank you for your thoughts and clearly explaining the problem I didn't know I had!