Connect Social Media

Sachin Agarwal, the founder of the lifestreamer and blogging site Posterous.com took time out of his busy schedule to visit with me about his platform.

Posterous.com

Jim: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

Sachin: Posterous is the easiest way to post everything online. You simply send an email to post@posterous.com. You can attach images, video, audio, documents, anything at all. We’ll convert everything to the most web friendly format and publish it online, for free. It’s dead simple, yet powerful. You don’t even need an account to use Posterous. We want to let people focus on the content, instead of dealing with setting up websites.

Before Posterous, I worked on Final Cut Pro at Apple for six years. I’ve been a Mac user my entire life, and so good product design in technology has always been important to me. I spent half of my Apple years working remotely from New York City. I think being at Apple, and being in New York (away from Silicon Valley) helped tremendously in designing a product made for the average consumer. Sometimes being in the middle of they valley here lets you forget what normal people know, understand, or want.

Jim:  What do you call your site…a blog? Microblog? Microsite?

Sachin:  Definitely not a microblog

Most closely, yes we are a blog. However, we want to move away from that term. “Blogging” scares people. It’s always meant long text posts, not rich media. Too many people have set up blogs and abandoned them, to want to try another one.

Recently people have been using “life streaming” which was coined by Steve Rubel. It seems pretty accurate. This is my life, in photos and video and text, on my website.

Posterous.com

Jim: What tabs are you opening in your browser first thing every morning?

Sachin: Tab one: posterous.com. Is the site still operational? Ok, good.

Then I’ll open email. Between my personal email, work email, and Posterous support box, I’ll have hundreds of unread messages. I’ll make a quick pass to make sure there’s nothing urgent, no fires to put out. I can’t get to all the support immediately, but I’ll answer any questions that are totally blocking users.

Then back to Safari. I’ll open my.yahoo.com to see news headlines and the stock market. And macnn.com to see if Apple released anything new (or who is suing them today).

Finally, I’ll check out Twitter. For me, Twitter is really just for real-time monitoring of Posterous. What are people saying about us? Are people complaining about anything? If so, fix it asap.

Jim: Share some “insider info” about how Posterous came to be – what was the inspiration and when?
Sachin:  Posterous came about because of pure frustration with the products and services that I was using. I had a blog on Blogger for years, but fell into the standard trap of not updating it frequently enough. Then I wanted to post photos more, but I had to use a site like Flickr. It was a mess.

I wanted to build a new way to publishing online, bring together the personal “blog style” website, with the rich media functionality of sites like Flickr and Youtube. Why are all these separate? Email *seemed* like the way to do, since it was built into iPhoto. Then the iPhone came out and there was no question about it. I wanted to post from my iPhone, and email was the only way to do it.

I remember being on vacation and posting some photos from my hotel room. That was a great moment. It was so easy, so painless, that I did it *from a hotel room*. It was the moment I realized this was bigger than just a tool for me.

Jim: Web 2 technology has created an explosion of social community sites featuring user-generated content.  How does Posterous meet a need in that space?
Sachin: There are some really great user generated content sites out there. Some are great at photos, some are great for video, and some for documents. But why do I need to use so many sites? Why do I need to decide which site to use, and then learn how to use it? How can I expect my mom to figure all this out?

Posterous fits a need by being the “Apple of blogging”. We make the hard decisions for you. We created a product that’s easy to use out of the box, doesn’t require you to make lots of decisions or learn new software. We want you to think of Posterous as “magic”. You just send us an email and what come out on the other end, just works.

Jim: Your home page answers the question “Who’s It For” and lists first timers, casual bloggers, social media pros and families/groups.  Can you walk us through examples of how each of those can take advantage of the Posterous platform?
Sachin:  We’re seeing a lot of people publishing online with Posterous who *never* had a web presence before. They never even thought they knew how to do it. But by using email to publish, a tool people already understand and use, we made publishing online accessible to many more people.

One great market we’re addressing is group sites for families. We’re seeing someone who is somewhat tech savvy set up a site for their family. They add all their family members as contributors simply by adding their email addresses on the site. Those family members can now post to the site by emailing post@smithfamily.posterous.com. They don’t need to create accounts or learn anything new. To them, it’s just an email list. But hey, where did this blog come from?

Bloggers who have been using other services for years are switching over to Posterous. Yes, they know how to run their own servers or use these other products. But then they see just how easy it is to post to Posterous. They see how well we handle rich media. And then they realize they don’t *want* to run their own sites or manage all the details. They would rather focus on the content.

Jim:  How might a business take advantage of a Posterous account?
Sachin:   Posterous works very well for businesses. Every business should have a web presence. Having a company blog that is updated frequently shows that the company is still alive, the blog is the pulse of the business. So having a blog that can be updated quickly, easily, with rich media, by many contributors, is very important for a business.

And with Posterous, updating the blog will also update the company Twitter account, and company page on Facebook. So with minimal effort, just an email, a business can keep all their social networks up to date.

Jim:  Ok, let’s say someone already has a blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook profile.  Where and how does Posterous fit into that mix?
Sachin:   I love Twitter and Facebook. I have communities within all these services, friends and family that follow me on these sites. But ultimately, Twitter and Facebook aren’t *my site*. They aren’t on my domain, they don’t have my look and feel, and I can’t control how they work.

So no matter what social networks I use, I’m always going to want *my home on the web* that is permanent, and personal.

Jim:  How are users taking advantage of the Google Maps feature?
Sachin:   Google Maps integration is one of the newest pieces of Posterous. When you email a photo from your iPhone, or post using our iPhone app [might be released at time this is published], we’ll put a Google Map on the post.

When you see a photo on a website, it’s always great to have as much context as possible. And location is one of the best ways to learn more about the photo you are viewing. Whether you are away on vacation and we can see what country you are in, or you are at a local bar, it’s really cool to see exactly where the photo was taken.

And the beauty here is it’s automatic. We believe in making posting easier, without too many options or settings. Since location info is already embedded in some photos, it made total sense for us to just pull it out and do something cool.

Jim:  The ability to update your Posterous page via email makes it very easy to use.  Four years ago, email was the #1 most popular activity on the Internet, but a recent Nielsen survey reported that email had dropped to 5th, passed in popularity by social media and community sites.  Will we see the day that email is marginalized or replaced with a more efficient technology?
Sachin:   First of all, I don’t believe that email is the 5th most popular activity. People who think that are either lying to themselves, or are too entrenched in the current Twitter craze. There are over 2 billion email addresses in the world. I get hundreds of emails per day. Business gets done over email. Schools run on email. Blackberrys and iPhones are popular because of email.

Show me the day we can run our lives on 140 characters or less, and then i’ll say that email is losing in popularity. But right now, people spend a lot of time in email, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

However, I think it’s important to point out that the goal of Posterous isn’t necessarily “web publishing via email” but “web publishing using the best tools”. Today we think that’s email. It’s an iPhone app. It’s being built into Twitter apps. Instead of building complicated, bloated software, we want to build simple tools, and integrate into tools people already use.

If in a year there’s a new tool out there, a new technology for posting that makes sense, we’ll be the first to support it. Whatever makes for the best product and best experience for our users, we’ll be there.

Jim:  Talk a little about SimplyTweet’s integration with Posterous – how does it make life easier for a user?
Sachin:   SimplyTweet has done a really great job of integrating with Posterous. Like I said, instead of building new, complicated software, we want to integrate into the tools people already use. And millions of people are using Twitter clients on their iPhones.

All Twitter clients can post tweets, and they all let you post a photo online using a separate image hosting service. But SimplyTweet took things to the next level. You can post multiple photos to Posterous to get an image gallery. You can post long tweets, add tags to your posts, and much more.

Instead of just following what all the other Twitter clients do, SimplyTweet went ahead and did what’s best for the user.

Jim:  How did you/do you use customer input/feedback in your development process?
Sachin:   Customer input is incredibly important to use. We launched Posterous about 14 months ago, but even today we respond to every single support email personally. I read every single tweet on Twitter with the word “posterous” in it. We want to make sure we’re building a product that our users love, and address any concerns they have.

We built Posterous to fix a problem in our own lives, but now we’re building something we hope will be used by hundreds of millions of people. So there’s no way to do that without listening to all the great feedback we get from our users.

Jim:  How do you see Posterous evolving over the next 6-12 months?  What’s coming down the pike?
Sachin:   We’ve got a ton of new features in the pipeline. We’re now releasing our first iPhone app, PicPosterous. People constantly asked us, “Do you have an iPhone app?” and I’d ask, “What would it do? How would it be better than email on the iphone?” There’s no reason to build an app just for the sake of having an app.

PicPosterous is different. I designed PicPosterous to *replace* the camera app on my iPhone. With the iPhone, there’s a separation between taking photos with Camera and uploading photos via email. PicPosterous merges these two. Every photo you take via PicPosterous uploads when you take it. So you just create an album for an event and shoot photos into it. When the event is done, so are you. Your photos are already online.

We’re also adding themes and customization, and more features to make Posterous even better for groups.

More blogs:

Online use of social media surpasses use of email

Catch Part 1 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

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Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

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Unique visits grew to 19.7 million and total visits spiked 7% (annualized pace of 84%) during the month of May to 134 million.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/?metric=sess&months=12

If you missed it, here’s our interview with Kristi Colvin from Twitterface.

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter.

Nielsen reports that the use of social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, YouTube and others has passed the use of email to become the 4th most popular activity online, growing at double the rate of the other four activities ranking in the top five.

Report Highlights

1)  Social network and blogging sites are now the fourth most popular activity on the Internet, surpassing email in 2008.  They now trail only 1) search, 2) portals and 3) online software, and sport a growth rate more than twice that of any of the other four largest sectors.

2)  Time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing at over 3x the rate of overall Internet growth

3) People under 18 years old are making up less of the social network and blogging audience, whereas the 50+ age group are accounting for more of the audience.

4) Growth in mobile social networking is exploding, with increases of 249% in the UK
and 156% in the US in 2008.

Download the Nielsen report Global Faces and Networked Places.

If you missed it, here’s our interview with Kristi Colvin from Twitterface.

Catch Part 1 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

Learn more about how #followfriday works.

Part 2 of our TwitterViews session with Candis Hidalgo from Twitbacks.com.  Catch Part 1 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

Twitbacks.com

Jim Quillen:    On TwitBacks for just a second.  Twitter’s changing about every month, it seems like.  Something gets upgraded or altered, and I know there will probably be more changes coming in the future.  Does that impact your product at all, TwitBacks?  I’m not an expert at all on graphic design or anything, but does that change the way you have to deliver your product at all?

Candis Hidalgo:    Right.  So far it hasn’t, but I guess their growth indirectly affects us just because that does oftentimes lead to downtime on their servers, which trickle over to us.  And a lot of our users ask what’s the problem, why can’t I upload my background, and things like that.  That’s something that we don’t have any control over.  That definitely affects us.  Whenever Twitter is having issues as far as how slow they are or upload issues, then that’s automatically transferred to us as well, so that’s something that we’ve felt.

As far as changes that they’ve made, it hasn’t affected us yet, though, but I know it has affected some other Twitter apps.  There’s nothing that says that it’s impossible tomorrow, for Twitter itself, to come out with something that would allow users to do what they can only do on TwitBacks right now.  That’s something we’re definitely aware of, but so far, the changes that Twitter has implemented haven’t affected us.

Jim:    In terms of developing your product or enhancing it, how do you guys use customer feedback or input in that process?

Candis:    That’s a great question.  It’s one I love to answer because I would say that probably, this is a really rough figure here, but something like 90 percent of everything that we’ve developed since TwitBacks has launched has been in direct response to a request or feedback that we’ve gotten from our users.

We were very active on Twitter when we first launched because we were hungry for that feedback, and we are still active on Twitter now.  Really, we launched with six backgrounds to choose from, no ability to add social networking in there, and pretty much that was it.

Since then, we’ve expanded our gallery to, I think, over 80 different things to choose from.  We’ve added the ability to upload your own image and added the social network in there.  We added a new promote profile feature, which allows you just to advertise their service on the web through their Twitter profile.  We’ve added a lot of things, and pretty much that was all due to requests that we got from our Twitter users.

Twitbacks.com

Jim:    Do they just come to your website and make those requests, or do you get a lot of those through your Twitter account?

Candis:    Most of them are through the Twitter account, just either asks or direct messages through the Twitter account.  Some of them are just in the form of a question, what about this, do you guys do this, or it would be great if you did this.  Most of those are through the Twitter account.

Jim:    I guess that’s an easy way to communicate with you.

Candis:    Yeah, definitely.

Jim: Looking ahead here in the next 6 to 12 months, how do you see your product evolving? It sounds like you’ve added a lot of new features over just the last six months. It’s more image options to choose from and more data that customers or users can add to their profile. What’s coming up next?

Candis: Right. We’ll always be adding more backgrounds, so users can definitely expect that. Aside from that, we have a couple of things that we are kind of deciding which direction to go in, but it would be great if Twitter would allow some kind of HTML in the background. That would allow the links to be live and active. That’s almost the number one request that we get, but it’s something that we can’t implement yet until Twitter allows that.

That would be great because I think that that would make a lot of our users happy, and it would allow people to click onto those other links that users have, especially since the Twitter buy (sp) only allows, I think, 160 characters. It’s just real limited, but that would allow, that would really, I think, take the TwitBacks background to that next level. That’s something that we are crossing our fingers with, but we’ve had no word from Twitter yet that that’s going to be happening.

There are a couple of other things. I don’t want to necessarily say exactly what yet, but that we are working on to add some more—

Jim: The ability to add HTML into the image, that would be a pretty big deal, but is that like a 50/50 chance that they’ll do that, or are you getting indications that maybe that’s a direction that they’re heading?

Candis: We’re not getting indications. We’ve inquired, but we haven’t gotten any response one way or the other. So to say 50/50, I would say I would be hopeful that that’s the case. I really don’t know. I think it would definitely have to be beneficial for Twitter itself to be willing to go and make that change. Whether that’s the case or not for them, I’m not sure, unless they were planning on doing something with Twitter backgrounds themselves, in which case how that would affect us. We’ll see. But that’s definitely something we’re hoping for.

Jim: I can imagine. That would be great.  The BusinessWeek feature:  how did that change your business?

Candis: First, we were thrilled because it’s received its fair share of press, but the interest from BusinessWeek was just very exciting. Since that piece was published, we have seen an increase in Twitter backgrounds being created, and an increase in traffic. However, it hasn’t been a crazy amount that you might expect, and I think that’s just because it focused on 18 different applications, so it wasn’t really just about TwitBacks. It was about 18 really great Twitter applications.

I think more than anything, though, it’s just really kind of cool to have been noticed and recommended by such an established news source. I think that’s been the biggest plus on our end is just having that recognition. That was great.

Jim: When you guys do your marketing, do you ever have the inclination to just scan through user’s pages and see who doesn’t have a background?

Candis: Twitter users, you mean?

Jim: Twitter users, yeah. You scan through and somebody has their account set up but they don’t have any background. It’d be perfect for them to get one from you guys.

Candis: We haven’t gone there yet. I think that’s definitely a great idea, but we haven’t gone there yet. We are a pretty small company. Really, it’s just I do the marketing, and we have a customer service person and we have an admin person and that’s it. If we had more resources, that would be great.

What we do is monitor the Twitter stream, so anybody who’s mentioning Twitter backgrounds, or where can I do this or that, we try and respond to those types of things because we know that we can definitely be useful to people who are directly looking for something like that.

Jim: What tool do you use to monitor that?

Candis: Just search.twitter.

Jim: Just search. Final thoughts. Your URL is www.TwitBacks.com.

Candis: Right, www.TwitBacks.com, and our blog is www.TwitBacks.com/blog.

Jim: Anything else upcoming that you want to talk about, or final thoughts?

Candis: I would just say our aim with TwitBacks is to have every Twitter background have a TwitBacks on their profile. That would be great. Everybody who doesn’t have those Photoshop skills or have the money to pay for a custom background. That’s our goal, and we would be very happy if we got to that point. We do have some other exciting things opening within probably the next four months, so be looking out for that.

Other than that, it’s been great. It’s been a great ride, an unbelievable experience just in six months to go from nothing to over 45,000 Twitter backgrounds have been created since we launched at the end of November. Really, that’s only been possible because of Twitter. The ability we’ve had to spread the word on Twitter.

Jim: How do you notify people of changes or updates? Is that, again, by following your TwitBacks account?

Candis: Just follow us at TwitBacks. Any updates, any new releases on backgrounds or changes to the site or anything like that we always announce on our twitter account. Then we also do announce them on our blog. Either one of those, you can keep up to date.

Jim: Very good. We’ve been speaking with Candis Hidalgo, who is the marketing communications director with Go Smart Solutions for the TwitBacks product at www.TwitBacks.com. That wraps up our interview today.

Candis, thank you so much for coming on.

Candis: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.

Jim: We’ll see you on Twitter!

Candis: All right. Thanks, Jim. Talk to you soon.

If you missed it, here’s our interview with Kristi Colvin from Twitterface.

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter.