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.

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