Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network

OK, nice to know this through tech-media. Not that I was using this on daily basis but I thought as a registered user, I should have known first via email.

Finally someone has a story about it! The iPhone app updated this morning and I couldn't' find any details about it (my tweets were the only mentions of it in Twitter search).

I was an early Posterous user (still active), long waiting for another shoe to drop. The missing social things (stream view, notification banner, having others' content be your Dashboard, not your own old posts) seemed to be just sitting there, ready to be added at any moment.

The good:

So... the new dashboard view is better for presenting data that they already had "verbs" for. You can see new hearts (likes) to your posts much more easily, the default view is your subscriptions, not your own old posts (as it was previously).

Still needs work:

Discovery. There is no "regular" search, there is no tag search. The Find Friends just spins into time out for me. There is no directory or recommended Posterous spaces either.

[edit: Added everything below this line]

I'm generally hopeful. But I'm bummed that they really steer away from using the word blog/setting expectations for blog feature development. The "Sharing stuff socially" space is crowded and well served at a rapid pace with Path, Google+, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, etc.

I really want blog services to have a modern social lens (like Tumblr). Right now Tumblr is the only place that comes close.

I think there's room for more than one social blog platform (there's clearly room for more than one social photo sharing site, music sharing site, etc).

Posterous initially seemed to be a social blog platform that wanted to build out some of the "regular" (WordPress) features missing from Tumblr, like commenting.

I wanted to live in a world where there was a minimal, control freak, beautiful platform like Tumblr... AND a more "swiss army knife" social blog platform like Posterous.

Since then, Posterous has done so many about faces (getting really email-centric among other things), that I have lost my initial read on them, but I like these new changes despite the fact that they're inching away from blogdom.

(sidebar: it's worth noting here that there is a 3rd social blog platform, http://soup.io. Soup.io, like Posterous, has long seemed to be on the verge of dropping another shoe.)

I really don't know how to feel about Posterous at this point.

When I signed up in the early days, it was awesome. They were the simple and concise, yet ridiculously powerful alternative to tumblr - email post@posterous.com, get a blog. I loved showing it to people because it was so amazingly simple.

I understand that wasn't quite enough to draw users in and they needed to evolve the product, but especially with this latest revision, my initial reaction was that I have no idea what Posterous is anymore. The messaging on the home page is terrible - "What's a space? A place for whatever!", and nowhere is the product itself shown.

As an existing user, my first reaction was to check my existing Posterous sites to make sure they were still blogs, and not Google+/Facebook-style Pages. And as a new user, I don't think I'd understand why I'd want Posterous in addition to Google+ or Facebook. (I understand that Posterous is better about privacy, but the competitors all claim that too, and Facebook never gave a shit about privacy - why would a new user believe Posterous?)

Again, I get they need to change their core product (or at least how it's positioned). I'm just really not sure a psuedo-social-network is the right way to go about it.

Even more than that, I miss the simplicity of "E-mail us anything. We'll post it for you."