Posterous: Between Twitter and a Blog

Forget about reading how-to manuals about blogging and coding. Don’t worry about aligning content in an easy-to-read manner, such as the image to the left of this sentence. And never say again that you don’t have the time to write a blog post that informs and delights.

Enter Posterous, a mini-blog application that Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan developed and launched two months ago. You can be a blogger and publish content — through your email address!

On Twitter, I am limited to blasting 140-character messages to my global network of followers. On this blog, I have no character limit but I try to write longer posts that I hope you enjoy reading.

What if I wanted to publish content for you to read online that was too long for Twitter and too short for this blog?

With Posterous, you can create an account by sending a message right now to post@posterous.com, and if you don’t have an account, you’ll receive an immediate response that an account was set up under your email address’ username. If you don’t like the name, you can log onto the site and change it.

And that’s not all. You can select social networks for the Posterous system to “automatically post”your entries.

For instance, tomorrow I am driving to Albany, New York to attend Government Technology magazine’s GTC East Summit. I was approved for a “press badge” and I’ll witness numerous seminars, including one on Web 2.0 while networking with IT directors of government agencies and checking out the exhibit hall.

As an alternative to toting my laptop and live blogging with services like CoverItLive, I’ll send short email blasts to my posterous account with longer-than-140-character-but-shorter-than-500-character blocks of text, maybe interspersed with images that I’d take moments before with my BlackBerry camera.

For every message added to my Posterous account, my Twitter followers (and anyone else who uses Twitter Search) will see a link to my new content.

I credit Guy Kawasaki for blogging about Posterous last month, in relation to incubator YCombinator. After testing it out and collecting dust for a few weeks, I resurrected the account earlier today.

Within moments of publishing this post, I’ll turn on my BlackBerry and send an email to post@posterous.com with a short sentence or two. Within seconds after that, a message will automatically appear in my Twitter stream.

Check me out at the aptly-named “ari’s posterous” at ariwriter.posterous.com. Oh yeah, you can add comments there, too!

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