Do you use Posterous, the free blogging and photo-sharing tool? If you do, why?

I just can’t see that I’d use it. I have blogs and a primary domain. I’m already all over the net with services, a few of which I actually use.

So to me, it’s just another place to publish, another dilution of my presence online.

It’s an itch I’ve been scratching for a bit in the past few days and which I posted about (on my Posterous):

So why would I use Posterous?

I’m still not clear about this. I can post by email (which I can also do to my WordPress blogs). The idea of using email for writing blog posts has little appeal to me. So I
am writing this on my iPhone which is probably the only time I’d do this out and about. Yet I can write a blog post on my iPhone and post it directly to my blog. I don’t see the appeal of Posterous. Why would I post content to another separate place? Am I missing a key point about Posterous?

I had some terrific feedback, opinion that makes it easy to see when you might want to use Posterous.

Linda Johannesson said:

because of it’s ease in accepting PDF, DOC, PPT, JPG, GIF, PNG and MP3 files

KeiTakahashi said:

I think Posterous is in between Twitter n a blog. Hard to write a whole blog post from iPhone, but want to write more than 140.

Linda and I agreed on one thing:

[…] there’s benefit when publishing to a # of blogs/campaigns from a simple email platform, but value is different for everyone

Allan Jenkins had a similar itch to mine:

Asked the same. If you’ve mastered WP/MT & have a domain, why? And not easy for a first-timer to master. Good idea, didnt pan out.

Andrew Orford said:

the *key* point about Posterous is to make blogging ‘instant’ for ‘everyone’. There should always be 1 easy way to do something.

And Kimmo Linkama said:

It’s easy to get confused about all the great SM tools – I certainly do. So I stick to those I know until a new one really hits me.

What was also interesting to me was that all of the above comments came in from Twitter rather than people leaving their comments on the Posterous post. That’s something I see a lot – comments via Twitter, not on blogs or where posts are actually published.

I do it too if my comment is concise and usually spontaneous. It’s simply easier. And I always try and link to the post with a shortcut URL. If the blogger uses Chat Catcher as I do, then any tweet commenting on a post that includes the post URL will get posted in that post. A great way to connect comments wherever they’re made.

But four people did comment on the post itself. (Unlike a blog post comment, the comments on Posterous don’t have unique URLs so I can’t link to each of them.)

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann said:

I haven’t been able to figure it out yet, either. I do think it’s neat how quick + easy it is to post media files + posterous automatically formats them. But still that hasn’t made me VERY impressed. I think WPMU will ultimately decimate all of these nonsense websites. How long will it take? Your guess is as good as mine — and maybe even a little bit better! ;D

Adrian Howard said:

1) Not everybody has a blog – so it fills a niche for those folk
2) I use it as an easy twitter image posting system, since all the others seem to demand my password

Caryn Stein said:

I had the same questions — it’s a nice, no-fuss interface, but not a lot of differentiating factors. That said it hasn’t stopped me from trying it out — ha.

And Krishna De left a terrific lengthy comment, two key points of which are:

[…] The other interesting thing is that it has a high Alexa ranking and I found a post I did here in the top 5 articles for certain key words on Google. I still recommend hosting your own blog, but if this gets someone set up and running fast then it’s the fastest way I know to start a blog.

That all helped me see what the value is of a tool like Posterous and how that value differs from person to person. If you want to see the extent to which you could develop your presence centred on Posterous, take a look at what Steve Rubel is doing with it (and why).

Thanks, everyone, great thinking.