My Online Thoughts & Pontifications

Well it’s now been a few weeks since I moved across to Posterous from Tumblr and wrote up my first impressions. I therefore thought it was worth a follow up post to let you know how things were going and see whether I had changed my mind about any of my initial observations.

So read on and I’ll outline what in my opinion has been the good, the bad and the downright ugly of my experiences so far …

The Good

So let’s start with the positives from the last few weeks:

• The templates. I really like the one that I have chosen from the standard set and probably wouldn’t change it significantly going forward.  The process of choosing and amending the templates was really straight forward and although it is as easy with Tumblr, I think the Posterous templating system offers a little more flexibility.
• Emailing posts. Again this is something you can also do with Tumblr and I’ve only started using it with Posterous due to some of the issues I’ve come across with other posting mechanisms. More on that later!  Posterous' implementation is very flexible, offering tagging and markdown support. The real killer is the fact that you can control the services you autopost to using the email address, which is an excellent feature.
• Autopost. This is the first feature where Posterous really wipes the floor with Tumblr, specifically the wide range of sites that you can integrate with your site and automatically post to when adding new content. The flexibility to turn this on and off through email and bookmarklet submissions is great. Also the intelligence behind the system to only post to certain sites when relevant media is added i.e. photos to Fickr or video to YouTube.
• Bookmarklet. Again another area where Posterous is more feature rich than it’s competitors. There are issues, read on to find out more about those. However one of the great features of it is that it will automatically scan the page you are posting about and identify all relevant visual media like photos and videos and give you the option to select one for insertion into your post. This really enriches the quality of your own post and subsequent comment, while providing full credit back to the source site. An excellent time saver!
• Twitter picture integration. Short one this but it’s great to be able to include any photos you post through your twitter client automatically in your blog. Many desktop and mobile Twitter  clients now support Posterous for both photos and videos uploads and it’s great to be able to share this kind of content with your readers and consolidate it all in one location.
• Post.ly Short URL. Another short one but I really do like the post.ly short URL format that Posterous uses in Autoposts. Not 100% sure why but just do :)

The Bad

Now onto some of the issues I’ve been having over the last few weeks, starting first with the general annoyances:

• Posting using the Bookmarklet. As outlined in the previous section, the bookmarklet is far more sophisticated than it’s competitors and while this does give some benefits, in my experience it’s also means its a little buggy. I suspect this is because Posterous are really pushing the capabilities of the technology but in adding in the extra features some of the basics, like the entering of text has become how shall we say, unreliable.
• Posting feels more complicated. Originally I put this down to lack of experience with the platform. However after using it for a few weeks I really do miss the simplicity of Tumblr posting. While it doesn’t offer some of the exciting features that Posterous has to offer, it always worked and I was never in the situation of having to go back and edit posts to fix issues, which I seem to have to do with a lot of the content I’m currently posting.

And the Ugly

And finally those things that I have been really disappointed by and would have me questioning if I wish to continue with the platform or at least start looking for other technical solutions:

• iPhone Application. This has to be the biggest disappointment to me and I stopped using it within days of moving to the service.  To put it mildly, it’s terrible! Key features are missing such as control over autopost and the ability to edit existing posts. In addition to this the usability seems pretty poor with too many clicks to do certain tasks. To me a well designed application should feel like it hardly exists and not get in the way of the user experience and trying to do the task at hand. Unfortunately this is not the case here and it’s needs some serious work!
• Performance of site. Not a lot to say here and no recorded data but my site just seems slower on Posterous, taking considerably longer to load. Maybe it’s the templating system they use or their infrastructure but it all seems a little sluggish to me which doesn’t fill me with confidence.
• Custom domains. I use a custom domain with my site, as I used to with my Tumblr site and my self hosted blog before that. I was however disappointed to see that when the site loads that Posterous seems to do strange things with the URL, switching it from my custom one to an internal Posterous one, before sending it back to my custom one again. It’s only for a split second but enough for me to notice, gives a negative impression and could make people wonder where they are being sent.

Conclusion

It’s still too early to draw a final conclusion from my findings. Yes I find the iPhone app for Posterous lacking and I’ve concerns about the performance and how custom domains are loaded. There are however at lot of positives for Posterous over not just Tumblr but other platforms as well, not least their autopost functionality which is fabulous.

So for now I’m staying where I am and hoping that further use will either ease my concerns or re-train my thinking to make the whole experience smoother. I’m also investigating various different editors on both my Mac and iPhone to try and come up with the perfect posting workflow. This is still in the early stages of development but you can be sure I’ll post more on the subject here once I come up with a suitable solution.

Finally I don’t want this post to be seen as negative or highly critical of Posterous. They are still a young platform, with aggressive development plans going forward and despite my gripes in this post, are still near the top of the pile as a micro-blogging solution, if not at the very top.

As a result I personally am more than happy to cut them a lot of slack and work with them as part of the community to resolve these issues.  I have already communicated my concerns with the Posterous team directly and will continue to provide constructive feedback where I feel it is warranted. Let’s not forget, there are a lot of positives to be taken from this platform, with I’m sure even more coming on stream during 2011 and beyond.

I will post more in about a month and let you know where I am. Until then I would welcome any comments you have on the subject below.