Um, oh hey guys, what’s up? Nothing much over on my side, except that I’d really like a Diet Coke. Also, I’m hearing that nascent photo sharing app née blogging platform Posterous is raising some money. So yeah that’s what’s up over here in my neck of TC HQ.
Chew on this if you’re in the mood for some actual tech news; the simple blogging service and Tumblr competitor has just raised $5 million in Series B according to multiple sources. Taking part in the round will be Redpoint Ventures, newcomer Jafco Ventures and existing angels. → Read More
Because you ain’t nobody unless you have a special version of your app for SXSW, Posterous has today released its own effort with Posterous Events, a which allows people at a massive event like SXSW or even something as humble as a family picnic to create a simple site around that event using their iPhone apps.
All users who want to create a Posterous site around an event have to do is open up their iPhones and create a .posterous address for a specific location and post (the site you most recently posted to will stay on top of your events). → Read More
Simple blogging service Posterous is taking its recently launched Posterous Groups function mobile this morning with the release of the Posterous 2.0 Android and iPhone apps. Along with the app’s previous functionality (including universal auto-posting), users can now create and participate in a Posterous Group over the phone, with the added advantage of setting up a permanent Posterous site to archive this information.
Posterous marketing manager Rich Pearson tells me that Posterous’ mobile efforts have more than doubled its userbase since its launch in December. Group sharing seems to be all the rage and this is Posterous’ most ambitious Group sharing endeavor yet. → Read More
Garry Tan, one of the cofounders of easy-to-use blogging service Posterous, is moving on from the company. Tan will be leaving to take a position at Y Combinator, where he will serve as a designer in residence. Posterous doesn’t put much weight on titles, but Tan had a hand in the site’s engineering, design, and product development.
Posterous isn’t taking off as quickly as its competitor Tumblr, but it has a solid audience and has recently released a neat Groups feature. Tan didn’t elaborate much on his reasons for leaving, but says that it boils down to wanting to work with smaller teams, which he’ll be able to do at Y Combinator (Posterous is now at around 13 employees). He also added that Posterous is going “gangbusters” and that he expects 2011 to be “really phenomenal”. → Read More
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.
Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. → Read More
Simple blogging platform Posterous has always been about email and co-founders Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan have taken the idea of an email list one step further and developed Posterous Groups. Groups, an easier way to hold group discussion, hops on Mark Zuckerberg’s social bus and proves that its only a matter of time before all blogging platforms become even more social. “This came out of our frustration with Yahoo Groups and Google Groups” said Posterous Marketing Manager Rich Pearson, explaining the company’s attempts to develop “the best email list groups product possible. → Read More
At least it did me. Touted by co-founder Sachin Agarwal as a one stop shop for all your sharing needs, the Posterous app (now available in the iTunes store) is extremely intuitive to use, and you don’t even need a Posterous to use it to start uploading photos, video and text, which, if you’ve enabled the Posterous “Autopost” feature will also post to your Facebook, Twitter as well as 26 other social sites including Flickr, YouTube, Wordpress, Vimeo and Tumblr. → Read More
Posterous users can automatically push content posted to their blogs onto other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and so on. Up until recently, people could even post content like text, pictures and videos to their Posterous account and subsequently have it auto-posted to a Tumblr blog.
Now, as of this morning it seems, people who try to link a Tumblr blog to the Posterous service in the latter’s back-end get served the following notice, which leaves little to the imagination (emphasis ours):
Link Your Tumblr Account
Your full blog post will get autoposted to your Tumblr. Don’t worry about where you’re going to host your images, files, or music anymore. We’ll always just do the right thing.
Tumblr autopost has been temporarily disabled — seems like they are blocking our API requests at present moment. We’re working on getting this resolved. In the meantime, you might try emailing Tumblr support about it.
Alphonso Labs‘ Pulse app for the iPad provides a beautiful way to read your favorite feeds. Unfortunately, compared to the newer entry Flipboard, it’s not very socially personalized. An update tonight hopes to change that.
Pulse is teaming up with Posterous to create a simple way for users to create their own “Pulses.” What this means is that they can with one tap add any article to their own Pulse — thus making any user an aggregator of news. Posterous comes in because each of these Pulse items are transfered to a free blog which is automatically created for you. “This blog will post the articles you have picked, hence enabling you to share this even with friends who don’t have Pulse,” Alphonso Labs co-founder Akshay Kothari says. → Read More
Snapfish, the photo sharing and printing site from Hewlett Packard, announced today that they’ve acquired the Motionbox video platform, allowing Snapfish to expand its video offering. Current Motionbox users will have their content migrated to their new Snapfish account, and the current Motionbox site will remain online until August. In related news, Posterous is wooing Flickr users as the latest salvo in their Switch To Posterous campaign. → Read More
Somewhere in between full blogging platforms like Wordpress and the 140-character limit of Twitter, true microblogging sites like Tumblr and Posterous are taking off. I call these true microblogging sites because they are designed for quick hits but can support photos, themes, and other more blog-like features. Tumblr has been around longer and is getting quite big (23 million monthly unique global visitors, according to Quantcast) , but the younger Posterous is also seeing some decent growth.
According to Quantcast, Posterous has 5.3 million monthly unique global visitors, with 2.2 million in the U.S. (Both Posterous and Tumblr are directly measured by Quantcast). If you look at the Quantcast chart above, you can see the different growth spurts Posterous has gone through. The first year after its launch in June, 2008, it’s growth was pretty gradual. But then, almost a year ago, it introduced an iPhone app which allows users to post their photos and thoughts directly to their Posterous blogs. One of the main uses of Posterous is to share photos with some commentary. → Read More
As you may have read yesterday, TwitPic and Posterous are currently in a row after the latter introduced a “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool that provides users with a one-click way to import TwitPic photos over to their Posterous blog.
TwitPic isn’t into the idea and reportedly sent the Posterous team a letter last week threatening legal action against the company if they launched it. → Read More
Well that didn’t take long. Halfway into their big 15 importers in 15 days campaign, Posterous has managed to make one of their competitors very angry. Twitpic is so angry, in fact, that they’re blocking the service and threatening legal action.
This morning, Posterous introduced their new “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool — a one-click way to import your photos from Twitpic over to your Posterous blog. This is the same type of importer Posterous has already made for Ning, Vox, Tumblr and a host of other services — as I said, they’re about halfway through the 15 of these tools they intend to make. → Read More
We’re big fans of easy-to-use blogging platform Posterous, which has seen fast growth, revenue and impressive funding since its launch in 2008. Over the past six months Posterous has steadily added nearly a dozen innovative features to its publishing platform, including static page support, comment moderation, custom domains, and a media sharing service for Twitter. And it’s no secret that Posterous is hoping to be the go-to simple everyday posting platform for consumers. Today, in its quest for world domination, the startup is unveiling a massive switching initiative to help users transfer all content from other posting and blogging sites over to Posterous.
For the next 15 days, Posterous will announce a different service daily that will allow you to transfer your account, blog, videos, images and more over to the simple blogging site for free. First up: Ning. To switch, you simple give Posterous the URL of the Ning blog you want to move and your email address and Posterous will send you an email when they are done copying a site. You don’t have to have a pre-existing account with Posterous either to make the switch. → Read More
Easy-to-use blogging platform Posterous has just launched a key new feature: Pages. No, the feature doesn’t sound sexy in the slightest — it allows you to create static webpages in addition to your main Posterous blog. But it finally allows you to link to supplementary pages like “About Me”, or “Contact Info” from your Posterous site.
Of course, other blogging platforms like WordPress have offered this forever, which is one reason why this is important — it’s one less feature users have to sacrifice if they want to trade in the more complex traditional blogging platforms in favor of Posterous’s cleaner interface and simple email-to-post functionality. → Read More
We’ve been tracking super-simple publishing service Posterous for quite a while now, and for the most part they’ve turned us into big fans. Unfortunately, they’ve just committed a fairly serious blunder. In a post earlier today, one Posterous user stumbled across the fact that his site was automatically converting all of his links to affiliate links using VigLink. There isn’t anything sinister about VigLink — the service helps publishers generate revenue without having to manually insert affiliate links themselves, and has received funding from Google Ventures, First Round Capital, and some prominent angel investors. But Posterous neglected to inform its users that it was starting to monetize all of their links, which is a breach of user trust.
Co-founder Sachin Agarwal agrees — in a phone interview he conceded that Posterous should definitely have informed users about the change (they’re currently drafting a statement about the incident). Agarwal says that Posterous has actually been testing the VigLink integration for months, which means the links have gone unnoticed for quite a while. → Read More
Earlier this month, Tumblr rolled out its first attempt at making money: a small ($9) fee to make your blog featured in a directory of blogs. Tomorrow, the service is officially rolling out its second revenue generator: premium themes.
The initial 13 themes being featured in this roll-out look pretty great. They come from 7 different designers and will range in price from $9 all the way up to $49. Tumblr declined to give the revenue split between the company and the designers but says that “most” of the money will go to the designers. The premium themes page is actually already live here. → Read More
San Francisco based Posterous, a fast growing publishing platform, has taken a $4.4 million investment from Redpoint Ventures. Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who is also an individual investor in Posterous, led the round and joins the company’s board of directors (and he maintains his personal blog at Posterous here).
Posterous, founded in 2008 by Sachin Agarwal, Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, is a Y Combinator company that began as a way for users to very easily post pictures online. Its appeal lies in its simplicity – users can just email a photo to post@posterous.com and an account is immediately created for them. But today people are using Posterous for videos and text blogs as well. Users can change the CSS and even use their own domain names – see Guy Kawasaki’s HolKaw blog, for example, which is run by Posterous. → Read More
Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.
Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost. → Read More
Dead-simple blogging and content distribution service Posterous has long used the URL post.ly as a custom branded Web address for blog posts hosted on its platform. Today, the startup is announcing that it has turned Post.ly into a destination site of its own, more specifically making it the latest media sharing service for Twitter.
Staying true to its well-earned reputation of keeping its services as simple as they are functional, Posterous has turned Post.ly into something I can see myself using a lot going forward. → Read More
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