Posterous is my new little toy. Its a service that allows you to email anything to them and they post it on your “posterous page”, sort of like as a blog post.

The cool thing is what they do with what you send them. If its a photo, they’ll post it as an image with your text underneath. If its mulitple photos, they post it as a nifty little javascript phot gallery. Video? They encode it and embed it in a video player. Audio? Again, encoded and presented as in an embedded mp3 player. Genius!

Whats the point? Well I got thinking while I was at Glastonbury, uploading all my Twitter photos to Twitpic didn’t feel like they were still mine. I don’t spend any time on my twitpic page, so it feels like you send them the photo, they host it and its gone. OK, so Posterous is still hosted by a company somewhere, but they provide the option to add an A record on your server let people access your posterous site as though it was on your own server. Mine can be found at http://moblog.mou.me.uk and although Posterous still has the content, I still feels like its mine.

They also have integration with other services, such as Twitter and Facebook. Depending on what email address you send your content to, you can get them to post it on any of these services – for example, emailing my photo to twitter@posterous.com will post it on my posterous site, then post a shortened link to the post on my twitter page along with the title – all but eradicating the need to use Twitpic, and keeping my photos with all my other uploaded mobile media content!

I’ll admit I was a little concerned when I saw how simple the email addresses were – for example, posterous@posterous.com will only post it to your posterous, twitter+facebook@posterous.com will post it to your posterous and then to these 2 services, etc. And these email addresses were the same for everyone, which meant that they are looking at the senders address to see if its actually from you or not. My workmate managed to spoof an email from me from his server – which admittedly, had a reverse DNS and domain keys set up (for his domain, not mine) which made it onto the site first time. I all but abandoned the service at this point, until a bit more testing led me to discover that the first email from an email address (after you authorize it to post on your page) was accepted without question, but any further emails are screened to check their origin – when I tried to post an email from my real email address, I received an email asking if it was genuine or not:

** ATTENTION: We noticed you’re sending this from a different computer or location, so it won’t get posted until we’re sure it’s you. Please confirm that you sent this.

Good work, my faith was once again restored. I deleted the email address I’d used originally, added my other primary address and sent a post in – so now if anyone does guess my address, nothing they send should get onto the site without my confirmation.

So Posterous is great and you should start seeing more content springing up on my moblog. As I’ve never been a regular blogger, this is a great excuse to post little items without having to spend 2 hours thinking, proof reading and rewriting! 🙂