posterous Archive

Blogging platform Posterous is currently down and out-of-service due to a DOS (denial-of-service) attack earlier today. The official Posterous Twitter account notes, “We’ve been targeted by a denial of service attack. We’re working as hard as we can to get it back up.”

Popular PR blogger Steve Rubel is one of the many Posterous customers currently down due to the DOS attack. Steve was promoting his Google Wave is dead article from last year and is now pointing to a Google Cache of the article.

Please report in as always if you are a Posterous user and are finding it difficult to connect to your Posterous blog. And remember that all Web services go down at some point and I am certain the Posterous team is working hard to get the service back up as quickly as possible.

Update: 5:49 Eastern – Posterous now reporting 25% back in service and 100% expected back within 45 minutes.

Update: Posterous officials have posted regarding the outage with some important steps if you are a custom domain user.

For Edelman VP Steve Rubel, Posterous is the hottest thing out there today. Last summer Rubel talked about how Posterous changed how he looks at blogging.

Posterous is a simple way to create a blog by using email to create online content and store it for easy viewing and sharing. You send your photos, videos and text to Posterous and they make the posts on-the-fly for you. Your posts can then be shared on the social services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your readers can also subscribe to content on your Posterous blog using RSS or email. Posterous co-founder Gary Tan was recently interviewed on the This Week in Startups show hosted by Jason Calacanis.

Yesterday WordPress announced that they have created a “Posterous Importer” for hosted customers. Similar to their other importer tools, this new one takes the content on a Posterous blog and imports it into a wordpress.com hosted blog. The Posterous importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the post that WordPress can handle “post via email” which is the core functionality of Posterous.

Compete shows Posterous at 1 million unique U.S. visitors in January and WordPress at 27 million for the same demographics and time period. Last week WordPress added a new email subscription option to hosted blogs.

We first covered Postling last September after an event in NYC. Postling offers a social media management tool which allows businesses to push content to a variety of social networks. You can post content from the Postling dashboard to multiple blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Drupal, WordPress, Facebook, etc.

You can setup multiple users inside of one account to allow a variety of users to manage the various social media accounts and blogs. Postling also aggregates comments from across the accounts that you are managing on Postling. What’s really interesting is that you can reply to all of the comments directly inside Postling and they get posted back to the source and only to that source. So if you reply to a Facebook comment, the reply is only seen on Facebook.

Last week at the Hackers & Founders event in NYC, founder David Lifson provided an overview of the social media service. I’ve embedded the video below.

The company also announced a change to their pricing model. In our first review, the service was at a monthly cost of $9/user. The new pricing seems to be a lot more involved — basically you take the number of users plus the number of “brands” and then find the associated price per month. Now a single user managing up to 3 brands is completely free but from there the accounts jump to $250 a month. I guess what this means is if I signup as a user and create a “brand” for CenterNetworks, I can add as many social media services and my account is still free. But if an agency wants to setup 5 users and 5 “brands”, then they would be required to move to the $250/month plan.

Overall the Postling app is very strong and as more businesses enter the social media arena, the service could do very well. Postling is one of the companies that I think would better off located in the Valley where the systems they work with are located.
Continue reading “Postling Provides Overview and Business Model Change” »