Introducing Posterous for the iPhone: The Only Sharing App You Need
Effortless sharing from your iPhone has arrived with the new Posterous iPhone app. If you are looking for a fun and simple way to update friends and family while you're on-the-go, the Posterous iPhone app is for you.
Context & Ripple Effects
Posterous has been building toward this since its 2008 funding round, when the company staked its identity on 'dead simple' posting by email and launched group blogs, then extended the product with a theming engine in 2009 to make its sites feel like real homes rather than bare feeds.
The iPhone app closes the loop on that arc: until now the effortless path was emailing photos and text from wherever you were, and the native client replaces the email step with direct capture-and-post. It follows earlier attempts to make the phone a publishing device, like Google's Picasa iPhone app back in December 2007, but targets the full share-anything workflow rather than photos alone.
First-order effects
- Existing Posterous users gain a one-tap path from camera roll to published post, removing the email-composition step that was the service's original interface.
Second-order effects
- Rival lightweight blogging and lifestreaming services now face pressure to match a native iOS client or concede the on-the-go capture moment, where photos taken at an event are posted or lost.
Third-order effects
- If posting volume migrates from desktop email to the phone, the platform's center of gravity shifts from the web inbox to the mobile client — making app-store distribution and iOS feature access a competitive requirement for any hosted publishing service.
The trend: Lightweight publishing platforms are shifting their primary posting surface from email and the web to native iPhone apps, betting that capture speed decides where users share.