So let me get this straight. Your big pitch is "Sharing privately with groups is broken right now ... Multi-attachment, inbox-cluttering emails."
And you're solving that problem (a few sentences later) with "Every time you post to the group, she'll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update."
How exactly does that solve any inbox-clutter problems whatsoever? If anything, it seems like it'd create even more inbox clutter. Am I missing something here? Sending more emails results in less clutter?
This would have been more interesting and innovative a couple years ago, but now that everyone and their mother (and grandmother, and grandfather) are on Facebook, I think Facebook Groups is a fine solution that offers all the features listed here.
I had this exact problem twice in the last month, and both times, I found that everyone in the two real-world groups I was trying to bring online was already on Facebook. Literally every single person out of maybe 50 people total, spanning age ranges from teenagers to folks in their late 50s. I found it much easier to get them to use it than it would have been if I had to explain this new posterous thing.
We found that Facebook Groups felt more like a group wall than a product for sharing and collaboration. You can't send attachments via email, and you can't reply with anything besides plain text.
Posterous Groups makes email the core of the product. You can do everything via email including creating a group and replying with rich media attachments. There aren't any restrictions on what you can post.
Facebook Groups doesn't work well as a mobile experience. It's important for me to be able to post and consume content from my iphone. This works well in email and using the Posterous iPhone app.
While Facebook does have a large user base, there will always be people who aren't on the service or don't sign in to it regularly. We're firm believers that email is the best way to reach people.
We've made it seamless to get non Posterous users to understand how a group works and how they should participate. Give it a shot and please send feedback our way.
Exactly. I don't know why so many people believe facebook to have solved human communication. This is perfect for the way my friends are I discuss over literature, science, philosophy, and political topics. This is an application not taken very seriously by facebook groups (long posts get cut off, the "docs" feature is underwhelming, etc)
That's great, thanks. I didn't realise until this announcement that you guys are competing with facebook in some respects (at least in terms of where people spend time online). The way you guys are going, I won't be surprised you will be one of the biggest players on the internet in a few years.
It's frustrating on a lot of fronts, man. Over on Windy Citizen, we're asking local political bloggers to help moderate our Politics channel as we need some extra hands.
We got a volunteer who said she'd help moderate, but then all she wanted to do was post links on Facebook that pointed to WC stories. I explained to her that we were looking for her to help edit stories, post cool stuff, and participate in discussions and she kept asking if we could just move it all over to our Facebook page. I tried a few times to explain why that was counterproductive but she kept giving me blank looks. I asked her what web sites she visits, and she said, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. That's it. Turns out, she doesn't even visit political blogs, she just visits their Facebook pages and talks about their content there. Unreal.
She's still posting her Facebook links, but the idea of her hanging out anywhere outside her "big 3" is just anathema to her. She's got X bandwidth for web sites, and it's all being consumed.
As far as I know, Facebook Groups still doesn't send media along in its email updates. While most everyone is on Facebook, many family members I know don't check it regularly enough to make it practical. Email is a different matter.
I think Facebook definitely has the stronghold with familiarity, though. I'd expect their groups features to expand dramatically in 2011.
By default, you get emails in FB groups for each message and comment, just like Posterous, and you can respond via email to post new messages (each group has its own email address) or comments. You could interact with multiple groups without ever logging into FB (I know because I do :).
I'm not sure about the media thing, though it's not really practical for video to attach the media...surely posterous doesn't do that either.
I don't see many small businesses or even teams within large companies using Facebook Groups to collaborate.
Not sure if that's relevant, since I don't see any way that they start using Posterous for that.
Whatever, I'm just throwing out my opinion that this doesn't seem like a big deal in Dec 2010. Maybe the ability to attach inline pictures will make all the difference, though.
Plenty of business and teams use Posterous Sites already today. Some are using Posterous as their public, outward facing site, and others as an internal, collaboration tool.
Many businesses also use Yahoo Groups or Google Groups today for email lists. Yet those products are pretty lacking.
We think there's a real need for a modern email list solution and we're confident we can get users from individuals to businesses to bring their lists to Posterous.
Also, Facebook just doesn't handle images well; anything you upload is downsized (though I noticed they've started providing an option for Higher Quality uploads) and you have to look for outside solutions to simple tasks like downloading an album. This is one of the reasons why I upload on my posterous and have it autopost to FB.
I just tried it. It works well as a replacement for Google Wave - but it's nicer. Also, the emails means that there is instant notifications, which was a flaw that gwave had.
If I send a HTML email to a group which contains an iframe, an img tag, and an input field of type "image", all referencing a remote URL, the process of viewing the email in the posterous interface automatically causes the browser to fetch each of those resources.
This is a privacy leak. You should remove references to these remote resources when displaying a message in the posterous web interface. You should then provide an option to "Load Remote Images". Much like most email clients do.
You have a tracking image embedded in the emails. It points at a redirector script which does no validation of the destination url. This is highly abusable. Example:
Ouch. It looks like you've done this on purpose. If I send an email with a link to the list, the link in the email I get back bounces through r.posterous.com.
They've now got a solid product and userbase. The business model could be any of advertising, affiliate marketing, lead generation, premium features, ecommerce.
Totally agreed. But which is it?
The decision on any of those models, if not properly considered, could have impacts that reverberate through their product and userbase. Advertising, done wrong, could break their clean aesthetic. Affiliate marketing, done wrong, could hurt people's trust. You get the idea. The business model is a part of the design, in that it works in concert with it - and people are eager to see the fuller vision of posterous realized.
That said, I agree. I think it's great that they're taking some time to see how their product evolves, especially when they seem to sincerely want to "change the game." One thing YC companies seem to do well is that they have the patience to take the time to explore those markets alongside their users, instead of dragging them into a business plan that detracts from how users want to use the product in their daily lives.
EDIT: Whoops, this answers part of the question, from their FAQ:
Yes, Posterous is enthusiastically a free service. Later, we'll be adding premium features we know you'll love, but there will always be a useful free version you can use.
Sachin's mentioned planned premium features in the past, so I think that's a good bet. They could also do one-off deals with big companies, like they once did with Coca-cola and Loopt recently did with Virgin. They've got a good brand and smart founders, I expect they will do just fine.
Honestly, I startups often say "premium features" because that's something that users understand and aren't scared by.
Posterous has raise $5M, so they really need at least a $40M exit, preferably bigger. Are they really going to make enough for that kind of exit from a small percentage of their users paying, say, $5-10/month for premium blogging features? Doubtful.
I think their plan, as well as that of many other startups, is to grow as much as possible and then either find a way to monetize their large number of free users or get bought by a company that wants some combination of the users, the employees, and the technology. But the average user won't be reassured when seeing this in an FAQ:
"It's free, what's the catch?"
"We want to get as many users as possible while making no money, and then we'll find some way to either bring in revenue or sell the company"
Users would worry that Posterous either will die one day when they run out of money or eventually realize they need to make money and ruin the product. But "you'll always be able to keep your same free product, but we'll add some even better features that cost money" isn't scary.
This isn't unique to Posterous. I don't remember which startup there was, but I saw "premium features" on the FAQ of another startup and literally laughed out loud because I knew that the combination of the amount of funding they had raised and the small amount that most users would be willing to pay meant that that was a lie.
I think a good business model would be sell this either as a SaaS service or sell the server outright as software to enterprises.
This model of running groups has minimal friction in maintaining records of team discussions (as opposed to setting up internal mailing lists) that will get archived in a central place instead of valuable discussion info hidden away in individual end-user inboxes.
- In gmail when I click "reply" to a mail sent to the group, it just goes back to the sender (there is a "Reply To" visible in the mail, but gmail isn't using it for some reason).
Otherwise, neat stuff. Not everybody in my family is on Facebook, and others in the family are leery of using FB because of privacy issues (unintentional information sharing between friend circles).
1. Absolutely, you can be a part of any combination of public and private groups that you like.
2. It should go to a custom email address and will function as a reply to the post. The sender's name is the author of post or reply in that notification.
I love the way you've made this work. However, it does not behave well with PGP signed emails. When a message is MIME/PGP signed, the attachment is stripped and dropped. When a message is signed inline, posterous corrupts the message leaving the header in place, but dropping the signature. If this is fixed, I am likely to use this service for some technical lists.
Think of Posterous Groups more like an email list on steroids than a web based groups product. You can invite people by adding their email address to the group, and they dont have to sign up for anything to use the service.
The service is fully functional as an email list, but better since it handles rich media well.
Maybe its the WikiLeaks debacle lately, but somehow my first thoughts were "cool, like that" and then "i cant use it, because i cant trust posterous with my data"..
better member management (people don't have to create accounts); photos, video, audio, documents are all supported natively; web view is far superior. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
And you're solving that problem (a few sentences later) with "Every time you post to the group, she'll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update."
How exactly does that solve any inbox-clutter problems whatsoever? If anything, it seems like it'd create even more inbox clutter. Am I missing something here? Sending more emails results in less clutter?