Okay, über-nerd content is over! Sorry to scare you like that. From here on out, normal levels of nerdiness only.
I like to post pictures from my phone to the Internet. To accomplish this, I have been using TwitPic, which takes the MMS message, posts the picture on the web, and then takes the subject and posts that on Twitter along with a link to the picture page.
It's a well-oiled machine, and it works, but it is not ideal. For one thing, TwitPic has yet to implement OAuth with Twitter, which means that they require you give them your Twitter password in order to use the service. This fact alone had me looking for alternatives, and I had been considering switching to img.ly.
Recently, a friend of mine I follow on Twitter started posting videos using TwitVid, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I decided to check it out. They use OAuth (at least, it's available--they also let you just give them your password), so that was nice. But I decided to take a look around at other similar services to see what they had to offer. In my experiment with TwitVid, the video I uploaded never made it to Twitter because it was still processing the video several hours later. I canceled the account.
In looking around, I found that Posterous came highly recommended for phone content, and so I did some looking. Normally, I wouldn't have thought of Posterous as the right tool for the job, most of what I see on Posterous is barrages of information that people share, mostly re-posts of others' material with commentary (similar to Google Reader, but much more like Tumblr). However, I had seen a good example of original content on Posterous, and I liked the format.
So, after looking into Posterous' features, I created an account and started using it. Here's what I like about Posterous.
- It supports OAuth, so I don't ever have give them your passwords for other services.
- I can post by e-mail, or, more specific to my case, MMS from my phone.
- Like TwitPic, it will post pictures to Twitter. Like TwitVid, it will post video to Twitter. Unlike both those services, it will post pretty much anything to pretty much anywhere and everywhere I choose.
- Whereas before, people on Facebook had to click on the TwitPic link on my imported status update to see the picture, now, the actual picture/video is posted to Facebook (and YouTube, in the case of video).
- It supports pretty much anything you throw at it: text, images, video, audio. It will store, organize, publish, and push my content out to other services in the way that I specify.
- It supports a bunch of other services that I'm not using yet, but would be simple to set up if I started using them.
- If I want, I can restrict a post to show up on only the services I specify for that particular message--on the spot, over MMS.
