Posterous is Either Really Smart or Really Dumb
Posterous wrapped up their "we are taking over the blogging" world campaign today with the roll out of switch tool that will allow WordPress users to move their blog over to the service.
Do they really think they can convince the blogging world that their platform is THE platform that all bloggers need to be on?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Posterous fan. I love its simplicity of being able to post on the fly via email with the ability to customize where the post is crossed-posed to, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. It's honestly, the easiest way to pump out content and very easy to post it to your other social networks.
When the San Francisco-based company launched the marketing campaign back in June, it did cause quite the stir in the blogosphere mostly because of it's blatant approach and attack on other popular blogging services.
The campaign was more than just talk as Posterous rolled out a handful of new tools in order to entice new and existing users to move their data onto Posterous from other services - services it referred to as "dying platforms."
From a marketing perspective, the campaign is genius. From a business perspective, it's more sizzle than steak.
The blogosphere has a slew of publishing options, most notably WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and Squarespace. These services have been created with traditional blogging in mind — longer posts, rich media, etc.
Posterous, on the other than, wants to do blogging on the fly and keep it brief. As a result, Posterous was immediately branded as a micro-blogging service that turned into a lifestream-type tool for bloggers that wanted to separate their long-form content from short-form.
So while I applaud Posterous' attempt to take on the big boys, they have to realize that they're not playing in the same sandbox. Yes, they are in the same playground, but they need to embrace the lifestream mentality and work on functionality and user experience as opposed to trying to knock off the Goliath's of blogging platforms.
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