At this point in Linda's articles, you've learned about Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and Twitter. In this article, Linda shows how to pull all those social media tools together and add some glue with Posterous. Posterous is one way to share your designs, programming skills, opinions and more through a venue that can be shared on Twitter, Facebook and your blog.

Posterous: Simple Way to Share...everything

At this point in Linda's articles, you've learned about Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and Twitter. In this article, Linda shows how to pull all those social media tools together and add some glue with Posterous. Posterous is one way to share your designs, programming skills, opinions and more through a venue that can be shared on Twitter, Facebook and your blog.

Posterous and Posterity

Posterous provides an easy venue for designers and it's a great format to use to share any news with anyone you choose. All you need is an email account (with any provider) and you're ready to send photos, videos and writing to Posterous. No registration is required, but it might help you to set up a profile so users can learn more about you. Once you post on Posterous using email or their bookmarklet or by posting on Posterous, you can share your post with others through Twitter, Facebook and your blog.

Named as "Website of the week" by Tech Now TV at the end of June, this site is run on Rackspace Cloud technology. With that said, you can expect growth in this space, yet you won't need to worry much about downtime or slow speeds.

I consider Posterous a sort of 'glue' that I can use to broadcast information to a variety of formats. You can use it to display new artwork, designs and other speciality work as well with few glitches. The power behind Posterous is knowing what you can do with this tool.

Posterous Basics

All you need to do to begin operating on Posterous is to send an email to post@posterous.com and they will post that email at http://yourname.posterous.com. The name that goes in "your name" will be the one that is provided by your email account. If that is not the route you want to go, simply create an account at Posterous by clicking on the "login" button at top right.

That link will take you to the page shown above, where you can log in, connect through Facebook, or merely sign up with Posterous. I've discovered that it's easier for me to sign in with my Facebook connection, and I have a tab at Facebook that shows my Posterous account blog entries:

The image above shows the tabs at my Facebook profile page, and you can see the Posterous tab. This tab was created by clickingon the "+" sign at the end of the tab row, and a list that pops up includes the Posterous tab for that addition. Think of this addition as a great way to showcase your work on your Facebook page.

Once you create your Posterous account, you can edit your profile, add a photo and set up your autopost options. Posterous currently supports the following popular options:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Picassa
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Tumblr
• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Xanga

Additionally, you can post to a singular autopost to any option merely by placing the option in front of the email address. For instance, if you want to post to Twitter, you post an email to twitter@posterous.com. If the email is longer than 130 characters (Twitter allows 140 characters), Posterous shortens the email and provides a tiny URL for folks to follow to your post at Posterous (which accounts for the difference between 130 and 140 character messages).

If you want to post to multiple accounts, but not all of them, post an email to twitter+facebook@posterous.com and your post goes up at Posterous, Twitter and Facebook. You can also address an email to #{text}@posterous.com and it will post to any site where the url contains that text. How easy is that?

What's a Designer to Do with Posterous?

Now that you know how to post to Posterous, my suggestion is to limit the number of autopost options until you decide what you want to do with your Posterous account. One way to decide what to do is to explore other designers' Posterous accounts to learn what they do. Some of the most popular Twitter user designers include the following accounts at Posterous.

To find a designer, simply type the designer's name and "posterous" (without the quotes) into a search engine. I went hunting for Nicholas Patten, and when I found him in a search the search engine took me to this page:

This is just the top half of Patten's Posterous page, where I learn how many ways I can find Patten and his thoughts or his work. This list might provide you with an idea on how to use various accounts outside Posterous and how you can link them into a central location at Posterous.

The second half of his page shows the people that Patten follows at Posterous, the people who subscribe to his Posterous account and other information such as the posts that Nicholas has "favorited." This is where you can learn about other designers who use Posterous and you can subscribe to their Posterous accounts, too.

If you go to the "nicholaspatten's work/life" link above you can head to Patten's page at Posterous:

Nicholas, like many other designers today, also is focused on social media – mainly to find the best tools around to promote his work (and the work of other designers he likes). You can see that the list shown on the search page for Nicholas has been moved to the right column here. Finding someone on Posterous is fairly easy, and – like it or not – it is much more transparent than Facebook. All the information I've shown above is available for anyone to see, even if they do not have an account at Posterous.

Here's a comparison to Patten with Graham's Posterous blog, "Designs72":

Graham added more information to his profile, which you can see in the right column. Like Patten, Graham also focuses on issues other than design, but those issues mean something to what he does for a living and how he sees his design world. You can peruse Graham's Posterous account to learn more about the tools he uses to promote his work and the people that he follows and who follows him.