In an ideal world, we agree. However, in practice, it's just a part of the fragmented web world we live in right now.
Communities of people spring up all over the place, and a problem we have today is sometimes you do just want to get something everywhere, without posting multiple times. I might have a community on Twitter, Flickr, Xanga and Blogger... today I have to log in and post something 4 times. Or, post once by email from my posterous.
I think that's valuable, at least for me. But judging from our feedback from our users so far, they agree too. And as a startup, that's what counts.
What about having an option to not post it on Posterous? I know it seems somewhat counter intuitive to the interests of Posterous, but the email "interface" is so much better than most of what's out there for simple posts.
I imagine only a minority of users will not have these type of posts sent to Posterous. Additionally, once you're able to have Posterous on your own domain, many users will make the switch entirely.
I'm a big fan of allowing people to post in multiple places. Especially when you're talking about flickr and/or Twitter which serve different uses than a blog might.
I think the primary thing I want to make me feel better about Posterous is some control (even if it's just a raw CSS editor) to make my Posterous page look better. Currently it feels like it's the bare minimum and it's actually somewhat painful to see my content displayed there.
I'd probably have not been as interested in having it pushed elsewhere if it looked better on posterous.
Keep up the good work, though. New feature seems to work like a champ.
Agreed. Angerwhale (my blogging engine) has a feature for transcluding blog posts from other Angerwhale instances. So, if you want to comment on something, you can post a blog entry about it and then transclude the post as a comment. Then the comment thread from your blog becomes a sub-thread in the including blog (and so on recursively). That way, when you comment on a comment, everything ends up in the right place. The original post that everyone is replying to is the canonical source for all replies, regardless of whether or not they are "comments" or other blog posts.
Anyway, this is the Right Way as far as I can tell... but it appears that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world that use Angerwhale. Maybe I should make the mechanism compatible with WordPress or something :)
(BTW, I should mention that I like FriendFeed's solution to this problem better than Posterous'.)
