Twitter and Posterous | Hacker News Reader

Twitter and Posterous

mattmaroon.com

58 pointsbrlewis22 comments

To be quite honest, I don't think Twitter and Posterous are comparable, but I do think both of them have tapped into two huge modes of human communication.

Prior to Twitter, there was no method to capturing stream of consciousness. Sure, there was AIM, but those chats are really transient. Twitter allows me to broadcast the funny youtube video I just found, or a frustration I may be experiencing with a company, and to have friends ride the stream with me. Not only that, we get to look into the streams of celebrities, something completely new. I didn't get Twitter for a time, too, but have realized its value and the 140 character limit, in my opinion, allows messages to retain their stream of consciousness type characteristic.

Posterous, on the other hand, is a more structured, more effort-in-your-post version of Twitter. But it's also an interesting middle-ground between both Twitter and conventional blogging, which I think is another form of human communication no one has yet explored. Blogging is for me to write a well thought out essay. Twitter is for saying 'omg check out this discounted laptop.' Posterous gives me a place to post things of importance with ease, in a nice structured manner. I don't want to throw up pictures of my friends at the beach on Twitter, or write a blog post about it, I want to put it on Posterous. However, I don't want to litter my Posterous with random links and thoughts. In those respects, I think Posterous and Twitter really aren't competitors. They both serve two different purposes, to me at least, and there is room for both to thrive.

They compete when people choose whether to do what Twitter is good for or what Posterous is good for. That's what made this post more interesting to me than a Posterous vs Tumblr post would have been.

A spoon and a fork are competitors in cases where you're eating corn or rice, but you don't use a fork to sip soup or a spoon to eat salad. Sure, there will be instances in which Twitter and Posterous compete, but I think those might be less frequent corn or rice scenarios. I'm trying to show him that there are two distinct purposes both services serve.

Maybe a Twitterous spork is begging to be made. :p

Kyro, I agree-- twitter and posterous is like peanut butter and jelly -- they're complementary and are better together!

I don't see the difference between Posterous and Tumblr. The latter also has an email address that you can send anything to and a great bookmarklet. Is it simply that Posterous sells themselves differently?

For other services, posting by email is an afterthought. it's poorly implemented, severely limited.

With Posterous, you can send us anything by email and we'll handle it. Multiple images, video, audio, other documents all in a single message. That message can also have full html and we'll publish it all.

We autopost to Twitter (tumblr does this now) but also to Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and all the major blog platforms. So you can email us once, we'll handle all the rich media, and then update all the websites you use.

We also have a great bookmarklet. You should try it out.

I did as you suggested: the bookmarklet is quite awesome. Moreover, combined with autopost it effectively fixes all the things wrong with the wordpress.org bookmarklet. Sold. Can I import my Tumblr account?

I dunno if I am stating the obvious, here, but Twitter's inanity is entirely dependent on whose "tweets" you are reading.

More generally, in the community I am involved in, Twitter has stepped into the gap left by the lack of a comfortable mechanism of interaction through Atom/RSS feeds ("blogs", comments and trackbacks are not convenient enough to use for many purposes).

I find myself going back and forth on Twitter too, but mostly because of what will happen to the service as it approaches popular-mass; the beauty and grace of it is diluted to garbage and noise (which is then retweeted). However, I do believe Twitter is a rare startup and deserves its attention. I am in the camp that sees Twitter as a once-in-a-blue-moon event; a communication layer this thin and robust RARELY comes along (much less with this type of adoption rate and explosive growth). Posterous is great and all, but it has nothing on the communication-legos that is Twitter's API. For example, we're integrating Twitter into our exercise app which I think serves a purpose, as oppose to simply leveraging viral ads benefits.

What bothers me about 'social media' in general is that I'm reminded of unionized labor. There's no doubt that customers are extremely important, but there are problems when a mass audience assumes each individual to be the #1 priority and/or the customer is ALWAYS correct. This type of self importance is becoming a problem on the internet with millions looking for a unique identity and it's wearing on me, both as an observer and business owner who has to deal with armchair customers.

ps. I wish there was an auto-block for self-proclaimed 'social media' professionals; it's the new SEO.

I don't think Twitter will be destroyed by mass uptake. I don't care if 100 million people are spouting rubbish on Twitter, I'll just follow the few hundred who aren't. Twitter Search will become less useful, but the obvious next step for that (albeit difficult to build) would be to let me search tweets just from people who I am following.

I both agree and disagree with you. I agree because as you mentioned, Twitter's unique structure in regard to following/followers helps minimize that type of noise. However, retweeting for example is not something you can block and that's where I see problems.

Certainly I always have the right to unfollow or block, but it doesn't solve the problem if I want to continue following a tech entrepreneur who's side hobby may very well be celebrity gossip or American Idol. (god save us)

Fortunately (Twitter's API is what separates them), clients like TweetDeck provide a secondary interface that's more adaptable to social changes through prioritization, customization, etc. If it wasn't for this, I would likely not be using Twitter... and any lifestream-competitor should give this a lot of consideration I think before trying to compete.

edit man i can't write today, sorry for edits.. it's monday.

> Posterous is great and all, but it has nothing on the communication-legos that is Twitter's API.

Posterous's "api" is that it accepts posts via email. Is that really that much harder to integrate with than twiter's api?

I have often tweeted a picture by emailing posterous and making the subject what i'd like to tweet. It works really well, and the picture also goes to Flickr & Tumblr, which is hot.

I do love the Flickr integration.

I just used Posterous to successfully document my daughter's arrival into the world.

I give it two thumbs up.

It was painless and straightforward to snap pictures on my iPhone and immediately have my family see them. And given the state of sleep deprivation we're going through, mindless is exactly where I need stuff to be.

Just think if the iPhone did video like, you know, every other phone on the market. Of course, maybe that would be a bad thing for a childbirth.

> "all I see when I look at Twitter are outdated limitations and people going to great pains to work around them"

Personally, I feel like the 140 character limit helps in one crucial way - it gets people to think twice before they hit the "Update" button.

Yeah, quite frankly I don't want to read any more than 140 characters from 99% of the people I follow. At least not multiple times a day.

Never underestimate people. You'd hope they think twice before hitting publish, yet if millions of tweets prove anything, it's that people still manage to cram in a whole lot of mindless drivel into those 140 characters.

I would argue the exact opposite. Because the amount of information you can transmit is so limited, it makes it far easier not to think twice. Think about it: writing a blog post is, for most people, an activity which requires a good deal of thought, revision, and editing. And why shouldn't it -- you can write and include anything you want.

Compare that to Twitter: how long does it take to think of 140 characters to spew into a tiny box? Not very long. And since it is so easy, it can be done 20 times per day! And since there are so many "posts", you don't really have to care about the quality of those posts individually. You can see this on a lot of blogs, too -- once-poignant bloggers set out to write a post per day and suddenly it becomes obvious they are grasping for topics, jumping sharks, and simply putting stuff out there that is of low quality.

There are two ends to the writing spectrum, and on either end are the essayists and the, uh, twitter-ists. The essayists don't release very often, but when they do it is close to a foregone conclusion that the material will be worth reading. The twitterists release a dozen times per day and while they will occasionally, perhaps merely by statistical probability, release something worth reading, it is close to a foregone conclusion that the material will not be worth reading.

Now we get to the "masses" part, and why Twitter will take off. Answer this question:

The majority of people are: (a) essayists, (b) twitterists

The answer is quite obvious. Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought which are things that most people either do not possess or do not exercise very often.

> Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought which are things that most people either do not possess or do not exercise very often.

This is the exact reason where I think Twitter's restriction shines. The average person isn't going to rethink or edit their tweets. In some cases, the 140 limit forces them to, without getting in the way of the user experience.

Type type type type. Is my message under (140) characters? yes -> post. No -> rewrite it.

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I will agree with you that the people worth reading aren't on Twitter. But I think there's something to be said about making a large number of average people marginally better at something.

"I don’t have to worry about shortening URLs, and I don’t need some Adobe Air client just to make it tolerable."

This quote sums up the argument between the two services pretty well. Posterous seems like an interesting middle ground between the super, uber short Twitter and other blogging services.

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