The Vacation Gals’ three editors have a shared Posterous account, and we can all post to the miniblogging site with equal ease. While we are still getting familiar with the site, its navigation and intuitive, user-friendly capabilities are pretty amazing. One thing that we are getting to enjoy is the easy differentiation of levels of photo sharing and privacy at Posterous. It’s summer, and in the spirit of the sunniest season, Posterous is calling the privacy controls SPF. No, not Sun Protection Factor — in this case, SPF stands for Sharing Privacy Factor.
Posterous is one of the mini-blog services that allow almost instant posting of updates and what not to the internet. Anyone with a smartphone can set it up to be able to essentially email a quick post to their Posterous account — making miniblogging a snap. It’s not constrained to 140 characters, hence able to mange more in depth content than Twitter. Photos and video load right up as well. Lots of people have enjoyed using Posterous since it launched; it’s a popular resource for those of us who work or play online.
I’ve used Posterous a few times and enjoy its immediacy. After learning about how geotagging on our smartphones is easy for people to backtrace, though, I wondered about how much my emailed Posterous posts were possibly revealing to strangers. After all, it’s ridiculously easy to create a Posterous post in my smartphone’s email setting, send it to post@Posterous.com, and have it be live in less than a minute (it might take a little bit longer with photos, and I’ve not yet uploaded a video to Posterous). I have turned off my smartphone’s geotagging setting, but not everybody knows to do this — or even thinks about it.
Managing your privacy settings on Posterous is as easy and intuitive as is the other aspects of posting to the site. It’s under “Manage/Setting/Privacy settings” on the Posterous page. This way, if you only want a select group to see a photo, video, or post, you don’t have to worry about the content being exposed to the rest of the world. And you can set privacy levels per post (unlike Facebook, where it’s either open or closed in entirety. And don’t get me started on Twitpic). Making a post private, of course, keeps it off the “slideshow” feature as well. The slideshow is a fun way to have a Posterous page’s photos on your screen, to look almost like a shifting screensaver if you change the size of your browser window.
The Vacation Gals will continue to happily use Posterous. It’s a fun and easy miniblogging platform that makes changing privacy settings a snap. Go ahead and explore Posterous for yourself: Thanks to its SPF, your own Posterous page can be as public or as private as you wish.
This is a sponsored post. Posterous paid The Vacation Gals to write about its privacy settings, but we used Posterous prior to this and will continue to load pictures and posts to the miniblogging site in the future.
I’ve heard of posterous, I’ve seen it on Twitter.
I’ve never heard of Posterous… I’ll have to check it out!
I think it is easier for Posterous to keep you information private, because many people haven’t heard of it, let alone use it, by comparison to the other two… That being said, privacy should be a top priority.