Posterous Theming: It's here, it's live, and it's time to make your site yours!
Posterous is proud to announce the ability to change the look and feel of your Posterous blog! It's been a long time coming, and are we ever excited about releasing this feature to you guys today.
Context & Ripple Effects
Posterous built its reputation between mid-2008 and late 2008 on radical posting simplicity — reviewers noted users could publish photos by email without even creating an account, and the company paired its December 2008 funding round with a group-blogging launch. Through all of that, the service's look stayed fixed: the trade-off for dead-simple publishing was that every site read as unmistakably 'a Posterous.'
The theming release announced September 17, 2009 removes that constraint. Users can now change the look and feel of their sites without giving up the email-driven posting flow that was the product's whole hook — a sign Posterous is trying to hold both ends of the market: zero-friction input and personalized output.
First-order effects
- Existing Posterous users gain site-level visual control for the first time, letting personal and group blogs carry their own identity instead of the shared default template.
- Posterous itself retires the uniform look that doubled as brand advertising for the service — every customized theme trades a little free word-of-mouth for user retention.
Second-order effects
- Rival lightweight publishing services that treated fixed templates as a simplicity guarantee now face a raised baseline: matching Posterous means offering customization without reintroducing setup friction, which pressures their own roadmaps.
- Theme customization deepens lock-in — a user who invests effort in a bespoke Posterous site faces higher switching costs than one who just emails posts into a generic page.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hosted minimalist platforms will absorb the feature surface of traditional blog software (themes, groups, mobile apps) while keeping posting friction near zero — collapsing the old distinction between quick-sharing tools and full content-management systems.
- Platform strategy shifts toward competing on time-to-power: whoever lets a new user go from signup to a fully personalized published site fastest wins the mainstream share that template-heavy incumbents leave on the table.
The trend: Lightweight hosted blogging platforms are layering full site customization onto frictionless posting, converging with traditional blog software from below.