I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.
TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web. → Read More
We’re big fans (and users) of übersimple microblogging service Posterous here at TechCrunch, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day that the young upstart would finally come out with an iPhone app. Frankly, needing to go to the camera roll on my iPhone and e-mailing in pictures I wanted to post on my Posterous blog every time had become a little tedious.
Now Posterous co-founder Garry Tan just checked in to let us know the iPhone app that had been submitted about 15 days ago has finally been approved by Apple and live in the App Store (iTunes link).
Unfortunately, it’s a bit underwhelming. → Read More
Microblogging is one popular type of cake, and Six Apart damn well wants a piece of it too. The company has just added a new element to its TypePad offering: a so-called ‘microblog-style blog’, which I imagine could just as well simply be dubbed a microblog. If you know what Posterous is and does, it’s easy to explain what the new TypePad feature does: exactly the same.
If you’re a TypePad user, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. → Read More
Posterous, the dead-simple service that makes it super easy to share your blog posts and media across the web, has acquired Slinkset, a startup that allows users to quickly build social news sites similar to Reddit and Digg. Slinkset.com will continue to operate, with Slinkset co-founder Brett Gibson joining Posterous full-time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Both Slinkset and Posterous launched last summer as part of the same Y Combinator class. Slinkset is a white-label service for building your own custom social news site in a matter of seconds (think Digg, but with your own logos and a customized design). Slinkset isn’t the only company in this space — when it launched last July I noted its similarities to a handful of other services, including Reddit, which had recently gone open-source and allowed for custom sites. But while it may not be terribly unique, it’s easy to see why the Posterous team is interested in Slinkset.
Posterous cofounder Garry Tan says that the company is going to build “massively engaging sites for both content discovery (via social news) and content posting (via blog streams)”. Beyond that details are scant, but it’s not difficult to imagine the kind of features Posterous may begin to implement. → Read More
The race is on to become the dominant media sharing site on Twitter, with favorites like TwitPic and newcomers including PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo vying for popularity as Twitter begins to hit the mainstream. Now Posterous is looking to join the race with a new API that developers can integrate into their Twitter apps with a minimal amount of effort.
We’re big fans of Posterous, the dead-simple blogging tool that makes it incredibly easy to post text, photos, and other media online. To post a photo or post to the site, you simply send an Email message to the generic post@posterous.com address, and the site does the rest. And you can optionally have the service automatically syndicate each of these posts to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and a number of other services. → Read More
ImageShack, the oft-forgotten and underestimated venture capital backed media hosting company, has quietly launched an alternative to the image sharing tools for Twitter already out there, like TwitPic and Twitxr. The tool is called Yfrog and like its counterparts it allows for immediate posting to your Twitter stream any image you upload or link to.
Evidently, the image is hosted by ImageShack, so this is just another way for the company to get more people to learn about their media hosting wares. Once the image is up (example showing a guy eating a yfrog), you get the usual stuff like embed codes, custom thumbnails, a direct link to reblog and retweet the material, etc. We should note – and I’m getting tired of having to say this every time – that you have to enter your Twitter credentials to use Yfrog so that’s up to you. → Read More
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. → Read More
Posterous, which launched in June, is one of those sites that I tested and it stuck – I continue to post pictures to it regularly.
What I like about it – you don’t have to create an account to use it. Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.
Today the company is announcing a new product, group blogs. You can add your friends or family’s email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too. It’s useful for families, sports teams, etc. to share photos and video. Once you’ve added those emails, all they have to do to post is send whatever they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com. No registration required. An example is here.
Posterous is a Y Combinator startup. They also just raised a second angel round of financing – $725,000 from XG Ventures and a whole bevy of high profile individuals. → Read More
The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch and have launched already. TicketStumbler TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”. CrunchBase Information TicketStumbler Information provided by CrunchBase People and Pages While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place. CrunchBase Information People and Pages Information provided by CrunchBase MeetCast MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity. CrunchBase Information MeetCast Information provided by CrunchBase CO2Stats For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today. CrunchBase Information CO2Stats Information provided by CrunchBase Youlicit Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google. CrunchBase Information Youlicit Information provided by CrunchBase Job Alchemist Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, → Read More
New Y Combinator startup Posterous launches today with what might be the simplest blogging platform to date. Yes, it’s even easier to use than Tumblr, which has a cult-following of users who like to post lots of pictures and short messages. Here’s how you create a blog on Posterous – email something to post@posterous.com. You’re done. Here’s how you post something new on Posterous – see paragraph above. The subject line of the email is the post title, the text area is the content. You can also email photos, videos and sounds files, which will be displayed in a custom Flash player on the site. My new Posterous blog, for example, is here. Is this a lot like Tumblr? Yes, although account creation by a single message to a generic email is a great way to help this spread via mobile devices (you have to create an account on Tumblr’s website first, then you can start emailing to a unique email id). Posterous also has comments on posts, something Tumblr is just starting to roll out to some users. Another great thing about Posterous – you can choose to have comments emailed to you, and you can reply to the comment by simply responding back to the email (I wish WordPress had that feature). If you choose to register your account at Posterous (which means creating a password), you can also follow other Posterous bloggers. The services are otherwise somewhat similar. Both are excellent for simply emailing in vacation photos and videos. One problem Posterous may have is fake posts via masked emails (it’s relatively easy to mask emails so that they appear to be sent from anyone you like). Posterous says they’ll watch header information like IP address, email client and other data points to sniff out fakes, and users can also request a unique email. We’ll see how they do with that – and we’ll give a free TechCrunch Tshirt to the first person who manages to do a fake post on our Posterous blog (but it can’t be off color, disgusting, or NSFW in any way) (Update: ok, we have a winner). Tumblr is a lot more feature rich than Posterous, which make sense since Posterous is only two months old and has two employees. But Posterous is dead simple to use and does the mobile blogging thing very well. New features will be launched over the → Read More
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