Well I've only been using Posterous seriously for a 48 hours now but I thought it would be useful to quickly publish my initial thoughts on my experiences so far since moving across from Tumblr
The Positives
- The Posterous interface is very feature rich and allows you to do pretty much anything through the web browser. The support for Markdown is also a great feature and makes creating richly formatted posts a dream
- The iPhone app, while not as sophisticated as the website, does allow you to easily manage multiple sites, something which you can do with Tumblr but it feels slightly more clunky.
- The auto post feature is brilliant and provides a whole host of services that you can integrate with and spread your content through. This is far more sophisticated than Tumblr and the ability to customise the format of the resulting posts is also great. This feature has also allowed me to move fully into Posterous, while still mirroring my content on Tumblr, giving me an escape route should I want it.
The Negatives
- I have a slight niggle with using auto post, in that you cannot easily choose on a post by post basis, which service this should go through. Some content I want to go everywhere but on occassions there is content I would prefer not to broadcast beyond the blog or only to a handful of services. I may be missing something but it looks like an all or nothing approach to me.
- For all the sophistication of the the interface I do miss the simplicity of Tumblr. This is especially prominent on the Posterous iPhone app, which I personally believe is quite clunky in comparison to Tumblr's and could do with some work. While Tumblr focussed on being simple you get the impression that the sophisticated extras that Posterous offers do slightly get in the way a bit and spoil the user experience slightly.
- Finally and this is a big one, I'm yet to find an easy way, short of using Automator (Mac) and the Posterous web services, to back-up my blog. It does concern me that all of the content I am creating is locked into the Posterous servers. The fact that I could do a local back-up or use a tool like Marsedit to keep a local copy of all of my posts, was a big plus point for Tumblr.
So all in all a mixed bag. On the whole though I have to say I am impressed with Posterous, it looks like a pretty sophisticated offering and I am sure if I dig more into the detail I will be able to get a lot more out of it. The inability to easily back-up my blog does remain a concern and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, they have planned to address this.
EDIT:
As has been kindly pointed out to me on Twitter, the first of my negatives can be addressed by using email to submit posts. To be fair to Posterous they even recommend this themselves as the best method for submitting content:
We think email is *the best* way to publish online. You have it at home, work, and on your mobile device. It's integrated into all the applications you already use. And you can attach any and all files for easy posting.
And with Posterous, your email can do even more
This also addresses some of my concerns on negative number 2. So on that note I'm off to read up on posting by email! :)
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