Posterous, the blogging platform/lifestreaming service that really can be used for almost anything, has released an iPhone app.
The app, called PicPosterous, is focused primarily on media rather than blogging as such, but as you’ll soon discover, they’ve released some very clever features.
As Posterous describes, “PicPosterous is an entirely different way of posting photos and video to your Posterous site. Instead of posting photos from an event once, at the end, PicPosterous PicPosterous “>is designed to let you post photos live, as you take them. PicPosterous can replace the built in Camera app on your iPhone, and publish your photos and video online live.”
Lifestreaming done right.
So say you’re at a wedding party. With PicPosterous, you can take photos and video throughout the day and have them automatically uploaded – as you take them – for your friends who couldn’t make it, to see. You don’t have to stop and wait either, just carry on taking photos and video and PicPosterous will work in the background.
You don’t even need to login to get started, just start snapping/recording away and if you already have an account, Posterous will automatically transfer everything over whenever you login.
You can manage multiple sites, create private albums and auto-post to your Wordpress blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and FriendFeed stream.
Breaking News
What’s really exciting is the potential in news to break faster and with more information than every before. Sure, with Twitter, news has been known to break fast and with the odd image linked from within the Tweet too. With PicPosterous however, you’ve got video and images being immediately uploaded and shared across all the viral hubs (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc..).
The next step would obviously be to bring live video into the picture. Something which Apple seems to be preventing at the moment.
Limitations
As Robin Wauters on Techcrunch quite rightly points out, there are a number of limitations.
“First, when you send pictures or videos to your Posterous blog, it’s impossible to add any kind of text or link from within the app (something I was able to do when I simply e-mailed in photos I took with my iPhone camera using the mail application).
Second, when you add multiple pictures to one album you can’t delete individual pics afterwards, leaving you only the option to clear all your albums and start over.
Third, you need to use your iPhone camera in landscape mode when you want your pictures to come out right on your blog, something that’s not indicated anywhere and you need to find out yourself.”
and fourth, which wasn’t mentioned, video only works on iPhone 3GS.
Despite the Limitations
The ability to be able to relive precious (and the not so precious) events and share them immediately with others using photo and video brings a whole new dimension to the iPhone.
The immediate photo and video uploading, along with Posterous’ signature slick and easy autoposting functionality also means news could break and spread faster than ever before. Despite the simplicity and limitations, the potential here is big, trust me.
Try it out here (iTunes link), it’s Free.
