Typepad released a new microblogging theme with features that match the offering of Posterous. Here is Wordpress.com page describing the same thing – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/post-by-email/ and a Wordpress Plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/. Their is also basic native support in WP for posting by email.
Though the ability to post to your blog and automatically out to social services like twitter and facebook is definately crucial, what is more interesting to me is its support for publishing via email. This is not a new feature but i’m using this as an opportunity to talk about publishing by email. I touched on this in a recent post – http://vocal.ly/p1g – but I have also been experimenting.
nudg.es is a prototype service that uses email to post micro-messages into an rssCloud compatible RSS feed. I posted a quick screencast demonstrating the service and speed in which the content is posted to the RSS feed.
http://nudg.es/feeds/sull@vastmachine.com/attachments/nudges_quickie_demo1.mov
A sample RSS feed generated from my cheap verizon mobile phone can be found here:
http://nudg.es/feeds/feed.php?user=sull@vastmachine.com
If you are viewing this in Firefox and possibly a few other browsers, you will see the feed (which is just XML) appear as a normal web page with a list of short messages and media attachments. This is because I am using XSLT – http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt – which allows me to customize the style of the feed to feel like a normal web page. XSLT could be better supported by modern browsers but that’s a topic for another day.
With the efforts around rssCloud and pubsubhubbub for real-time RSS and ATOM feeds, email itself becomes a fast publishing option. And email is pervasive.
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