When we first reviewed Posterous, we called it a ‘minimalist blogging service.’ All you have to do to start blogging and sharing content on the service is to send an email to post AT posterous.com and it will automatically set up a blog for you. Now, however, Posterous is expanding its service and slightly changing its direction by adding a bookmarklet that puts it on a direct collision course with tumblr, the popular microblogging site.
Supported Services
Most importantly, Posterous’ new bookmarklet automatically extracts videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Revision3, blip.tv, and many others. It also recognizes music on imeem and SoundCloud, as well as documents on Slideshare, scribd, and Docstoc. The bookmarklet also picks up on photos from flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, and you can even include live video from Seesmic, qik, and justin.tv. In addition, the bookmarklet also recognizes embedded documents from these services on other sites and allows you to post them to your Posterous.
Autopost
Thanks to Posterous’ auto-post feature, you can forward your posts to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, as well as to most major blogging services, including Tumblr. Sadly, Posterous does not (yet?) support posting to FriendFeed and it can’t save a copy of your links to more traditional boomarking services like delicious.
Taking on Tumblr
Sadly, Posterous still doesn’t offer an API that would allow third-party developers to easily create applications on top of the service. Tumblr, on the other hand, has cultivated a rich ecosystem of third-party apps.
Posterous, however, has a dedicated fanbase and the simplicity of the service has served it well over the last six months. This new feature will surely help it to gain a lot of new users, as it massively expands the usefulness and functionality of Posterous.
