My husband and I had a blog years ago, before there was Facebook. We posted pictures on it, shared favorite music, and documented stories about our life together. Then we had Julian and our parents were hungry for pictures, and more updates. We were dutiful and updated frequently for quite a while. Finally, Facebook came along and completely wiped out my motivation to post on that family blog.
When I put my pictures on Facebook, all my friends see them too, and they don’t have to remember to go to our personal site.
Unfortunately, my stepmom is not on Facebook. And neither is my Aunt Allie. And actually, my 29-year old sister has too many other friends to notice my posts. So when I posted my latest Julian rock star video, I forgot that some of his biggest fans were left out.
The grandparents (we have six actively involved ones) take a ton of their own digital pictures, too. Ones that we want to see, because they take our kids camping and on other adventures. And you know how they share them? They send them attached to emails. While it is swell that they know how to make the photo sharing happen, once I file away the email, I never see the pictures again.
Solution? Posterous Groups.
Only one person in the family needs to be involved in the set up of a Posterous group. After I set one up, I just add the other family member’s email addresses. Posterous gives me the address to which any of us can send an email — and then any email you send turns into a simple blog post. Even an email that you forward with 5 pictures attached.
The screenshot above is the result of me forwarding an email I received from my stepmom to the Posterous address. Done.
So now, after Great-Grandma’s 80th bday party and instead of a flurry of emails with photos attached, everyone can send them to the Posterous site where they will result in a series of blog posts with photos embedded. Super simple. A private group blog, via email.
My friend Elaine says that it keeps blogging simple for her because she just shoots off an email with the blog post title as the subject line, and whatever she puts in the email becomes the post. Done and done.
I can also envision setting up a Posterous site for my six-year old with all the stuff we look up online together. His personal site would be his favorite YouTube videos, videos I take of him, photos his grandparents send him, and emails I write him. Currently, he has no single place to look at all that stuff.
My next-door neighbor, a plumber, told me “Posterous is so easy, even I can can do it.”
The folks at Posterous gave me some additional concrete examples for their groups. You can use Posterous Groups to:
- Start an email list for everyone in your moms’ group to share outings, milestones, and photos
- Organize your movie or book club
- Start planning a multi-family summer vacation
So have I piqued your interest? I told you this post is sponsored, right? Anyone who clicks over and starts a Posterous group can be entered to win a $500 Visa gift card.
To win: Click over to start a Posterous Group and leave us a comment about how you’ll be using it. We can’t wait to hear all your ideas.
How will I know? I have ways of knowing, my friend, so don’t comment to enter unless you are going to play around with Posterous. (We’ll be validating email addresses.) If you ARE going to give Posterous Groups a go, then please! enter to win! We would LOVE to give a $500 gift card to a Rookie Moms reader.
Update: This giveaway ended on midnight Pacific Time on February 23rd.
Okay, I have a personal blog, but I thought I’d give posterous groups a try. Maybe I’ll get more visitors. LOL Will see how it goes!
This looks interesting – I never find the time to update the blog I started before, perhaps this will work better.
I’ve never blogged before, but I’ll give it a shot!
Um, did it, i think. i am horrible at figuring this stuff out, but im gonna give it my best. It looks pretty cool.
I’m going to use it to keep my non-facebook family up to date, as well as try and set something up to keep my clients up to date on new tutorials and software updates.
I already have a blog on WordPress, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and so while I’m going to check out Posterous, it must make life easier, not another website to manage. We’ll see how it goes – thanks for the link!
Amanda
Okay, this really does look useful. I’ve been looking for something like this to share with my husband’s side of the family, most of whom aren’t on FB. I like the shared aspect of it and that it’s email based. We’ll see.
Some of my siblings have gone international and there are new babies in the family. It seems like a great way to keep the pictures, stories, music, etc. flowing across the U.S. and Europe!
I signed up. I keep wanting to wean myself away from Facebook. I don’t feel like everyone in the world wants to see the 5million photos of our new baby girl that I want to post. So, I end up posting a couple and emailing the rest out. It’s a lot of work to make sure everyone in the family gets to see our daughter. Plus my sister’s email is always full and then she wants me to remember what bounced back and resend. This is much much simpler. So, now I can save myself emailing and people’s feelings getting hurt when they’re not on some emails, etc. Yes, this could be a good solution.
Cool, I was just about to set up a blog to share pictures and events with my family about my 3 month old. Posterous might be a good compromise.
I have a blog on WordPress already, but I get a lot of pictures emailed to me from my parents and in-laws. It would be nice to have a place to easily post these for everyone – me included – to see. They get lost in my inbox.
I am going to “share” this with the friend that started me on the blog. I had no idea they had a ” group” , great idea!
I just signed up! (I used a different email address, which I’ll be happy to provide if my name is drawn!) I’m planning to use it to keep in touch with family instead of maintaining a traditional blog. I had a blog when my first child was a baby, but since then we’ve added a second baby to family and I just don’t have the time or patience for regular blogging. This looks like an easier option!
I also have a family blog, and you’re right, since facebook came along and everyone is on there, I put the most pictures on facebook. I want something that will stand the test of time, and wonder if FB will be around when my kids are teens, so maybe this is the answer!
Just set it up and submitting first posts. Blogged for my first child’s first year. Said I’d blog for the next child’s first year. Next child turned out to be twins and despite good intentions they didn’t get a blog.
Maybe this will be how we can get back into posting 
I’m fascinated. It sounds like my mother could even do this, and that speaks volumes to how easy this process sounds. Thank for sharing!
I keep trying to blog from my phone but can’t quite get it to look how I want. Could this be the answer? I am sure the grandparents hope so considering I haven’t updated the blog since February 2010.
Genius. Why didn’t I think of this?! I’m definitely starting one for our chaotic family vacations and possibly for my parents group too. yah! thanks for sharing!
Hoping for a private blog of my daughter’s pictures for the family around the world!
I signed up just now! I plan to post photos and info for my friends and family who are not on Facebook, or who have Facebook blocked.
This is exactly what we have been looking for! I am hessitant to put much on facebook but want to send updates to the family- and am not much of a writer so a traditional blog sounds overwhelming. Thanks for the recomendation.
I am intrigued by this site. I am actually going to try and set up/convert my moms group to this site. Right now, we are using another site that charges a great deal of money per year to maintain. I am interested to see how searchable posterous is terms of google so to allow other like-minded mamas to find out group. We like the site we have now because it is very searchable in terms of a group compared to something like facebook, which really does nothing in terms of searchability of a group. Does anyone know about the searchability of the site? Has anyone had any experience with it using it as a public site?
This is awesome. I”ve been looking for a way to write family newsletters for those family members that don’t have a facebook (and I’d really rather not give them my blog address ya know?). This is the perfect solution!
I signed up. I would use it to post photos of my son’s juggling competitions/gigs and to communicate with other members of the juggling club
I love this idea, thanks for sharing!
My mom just emailed pics from their vacation to their 5 kids. This might be a better way to do it. I started by making a page for just me and DH to share pics, mostly of the kiddo. I like that it makes it easy to download the pictures.
This is AWESOME! I have already started 2 pages, one for my family, and one for my in-laws. Both families have photographers abound. Me and 2 of my in-laws are also due to have babies this summer and this will be a great way for us all to share without having to share with everyone and their high school sweetheart! So excited for this, co-operative blogging, what a great idea!
Thanks for the tip! Hopefully this will help keep my family organized for our big vacation/reunion this summer. I’m planning to post info and pics on things to do and see, restaurants, passport info, etc.
Super cool! A few months ago my dad and I came up with an idea to capture some family history. We wanted to ask our extended family a bunch of simple questions so we could see how alike and different we are. For example, we might ask people to describe what a typical morning is like at their house. My mornings are going to be really different from my Grandma’s morning, but probably pretty similar to my brother’s or cousin’s morning. And theoretically, my morning should be similar to my six-year-old’s but I bet his description will vary a lot from mine. Posterous will provide a really easy way to capture and compile all the different answers we get. It’s really pretty perfect for this project!
going to try this thanks I’m so NEW to everything
I signed up! The grandparents and great grandparents will love this site for keeping track of all the littles: across 3 states and an ocean.
I’m not a fan of Facebook, but I love to blog and scrapbook. I created a blog for my daughter a few years ago to keep everyone up-to-date if her accomplishments and it has become obsolete for the people involved due to Facebook. Hopefully, with this technology, it would spur the innovativeness that blogs created before Facebook. So, here’s to giving it a try.
I have a weight loss support group with a few friends. We started out doing daily emails back and forth, but we decided to switch to a blog format recently so that we could have all our communication streamlined in one place. However, without it in our faces/inboxes, we are forgetting to write. I am going to work on the to try Posterous with me, as I think I understand that we can email to the blog and have it all in one place but that it will also email our posts right to our inboxes too! Seems like the ideal solution!
I signed up and use it to share with my grandparents.
I love it!
What a great idea!! I started a group for our newborn that has all the grandparents and close friends attached. So far I’ve added pictures, baby updates and videos.
I signed up–this looks like a great way for my husband and me to share links with each other as we collaborate on projects!
[...] I mentioned a few months ago that I planned to start a Posterous site for him. We’ve been loving it. It’s his own website where we can forward pictures that his grandparents send us to show him and they are displayed as blog posts. He has added YouTube links to his favorite videos and my husband posted his soccer team roster there. You can post anything, like a regular blog, but also you can add a “post”, just by sending an email to a certain address. The site is private, so I don’t have to worry about him writing crazy posts as he tends to do and the whole world seeing them. For example, he wrote a recent post titled “My Dad’s Phone Number”. The text of the post? His dad’s phone number. [...]