4 ms·

The Problem With Posterous

7 points by OoTheNigerian 16y ago

joelg87 16y ago
I think you make a great point here. The thing I find interesting is that looking back it feels to me as though they did indeed get their first traction by carving a niche and being the best at one thing. In my mind, Posterous were the best at blogging via email. In my mind, they were the blogging platform for people new to blogging. I personally introduced a few people to Posterous simply as a way to blog without using anything they didn't already know. It was simple: the headline is the email subject, and the body is the content of the post. They chose to steer away from that being a USP, I am assuming for good reasons. You're right about it being hard to focus, however perhaps there is a strategy amongst it all. If they try and do a number of things maybe they can find one thing which people like the way they do or which Posterous find they are particularly suited to delivering a potential "best at" solution for. Then they could focus. It is almost like instead of systematically pivoting from idea to idea, they are doing all the pivots at once. This could, of course, be a complete misreading of their strategy.
LeonW 16y ago
Oo, I agree 100% with your view. The exact same thing happened to me when using posterous. It's really cool to start with, but I feel I am not really in control thereafter anymore. So I switched to WP, which I think is the best blogging platform available for your metnioned reasons. The wealth of plugins is simply awesome. Only recently I started using Tumblr and you are right, the design is outstanding. Community seems to be far easier to build as well. I can only say, I won't go back to posterous if there is not a big change in what they are doing. Oh and nice last sentence ;).
lhnz 16y ago
http://posterous.com/switch/ http://posterous.com/switch/ Huge copy saying "Switch your site to the simplest publishing platform on the planet" but just look below at the cluttered long-winded over-complicated advertising below, does it feel like you're on a 'simple' site?

7 points by OoTheNigerian 16y ago

I think you make a great point here. The thing I find interesting is that looking back it feels to me as though they did indeed get their first traction by carving a niche and being the best at one thing. In my mind, Posterous were the best at blogging via email. In my mind, they were the blogging platform for people new to blogging. I personally introduced a few people to Posterous simply as a way to blog without using anything they didn't already know. It was simple: the headline is the email subject, and the body is the content of the post. They chose to steer away from that being a USP, I am assuming for good reasons. You're right about it being hard to focus, however perhaps there is a strategy amongst it all. If they try and do a number of things maybe they can find one thing which people like the way they do or which Posterous find they are particularly suited to delivering a potential "best at" solution for. Then they could focus. It is almost like instead of systematically pivoting from idea to idea, they are doing all the pivots at once. This could, of course, be a complete misreading of their strategy.

LeonW 16y ago

Oo, I agree 100% with your view. The exact same thing happened to me when using posterous. It's really cool to start with, but I feel I am not really in control thereafter anymore. So I switched to WP, which I think is the best blogging platform available for your metnioned reasons. The wealth of plugins is simply awesome. Only recently I started using Tumblr and you are right, the design is outstanding. Community seems to be far easier to build as well. I can only say, I won't go back to posterous if there is not a big change in what they are doing. Oh and nice last sentence ;).

lhnz 16y ago

http://posterous.com/switch/ http://posterous.com/switch/ Huge copy saying "Switch your site to the simplest publishing platform on the planet" but just look below at the cluttered long-winded over-complicated advertising below, does it feel like you're on a 'simple' site?