But, a lot of visitors already have a blog; they don't need another one! Why on earth would they want another blogging account? You could go ahead and setup your new account to cross-post to your old one, that would give you e-mail capabilities to your existing blog, sure. Actually, the mind boggles at the sort of things you could make Posterous do for you; it's all about integration. And the one thing Posterous integrates with, better than anything else, is Twitter. Get ready to see how, even if you don't use Posterous as a blog, you can use it to perform some pretty incredible Twitter backflips.
What you'll need
- A Posterous account. Don't have one? Just send an email to post@posterous.com - put some text in it. It'll be your first 'blog' post (just nod and agree, if you don't want a blog). You'll get a chance to set your password and so on after that.
- A Twitter account. Enough said about that.
What to do next
- Set up autopost. This is the clever little feature that forwards your Posterous posts to other services. There's a link on the right-hand side of your Posterous manage page. Add your Twitter account here. (You can add other stuff as well, but in this post, I'm just going to do Twitter).
- And let the games begin!
Things you can do
- Tweet Blog Comments. This is neat. If you post a comment on a Posterous blog, you can select whether to 'tweet' your comment as well (well, the first 140 characters of it anyway), and the tweet will include a link to the post. You can be clever as well; you can 'massage' the tweeted version if the short form isn't what you wanted, or start your comment with an @name to send it as an @reply. Ultimate comment feedback.
- Sending a Long Tweet. Sometimes, 140 characters just doesn't cut it. You have to have a little bit more. Simple. Just send your epic message to twitter@posterous.com - it'll publish it as a blog post and then tweet a link to it. Easy as that. (By the way, the 'twitter' bit in the e-mail address just makes sure it only gets broadcast to Twitter. Peachy).
- Tweeting a document. There's a service out there called TwitDoc that will let you publish a file (using Scribd) and tweet a link. Guess what? Posterous does that as well. Just send your file as an e-mail attachment to twitter@posterous.com. Pretty much every popular document format is supported.
- Tweeting pictures. The famous TwitPic does this, but i think Posterous is easier and does it better. Just attach pictures in an e-mail to - you guessed it - twitter@posterous.com. They'll end up in a lovely gallery.
- Audio, video, and media mashups. By now, you know what's coming. If you want to share that wonderful trampolining cat video, or whatever, you'd have to mess about with bit.ly or something to shorten that pesky URL. Just copy the URL into an e-mail to - yup, twitter@posterous.com - and let Posterous do all the shortening, and it'll even play the video or audio right there inside the page.
- Private group tweets. Just thought of this one. A Posterous blog can be password protected. Post to one of these, and you can share your content only with people you pass on the 'view' password. I mean, how 'private' do you think a DM is? ;)
- Separate your stuff. You can have up to three separate Posterous 'blogs' - you can use this to organize your tweets. Serious power-user stuff, that.
I'm sure there's a blue billion other things I haven't thought of, but give these a try. A blog you don't have to use for blogging! Would love to hear if anyone else has any ideas!
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