Why We Copied Posterous

My employer, RateItAll, just enabled instant review posting of anything via email.  Just send an email to reviews@rateitall.com with the thing you are reviewing in the subject line (e.g. District 9, Negra Modelo, TechCrunch, etc.), and the rating and the review in the email body, and the review will post instantly.  You can see some coverage here, here, here, and here.

This feature is an obvious ode to Posterous, the lightweight blogging platform whose primary publishing UI is the user's email client / service.

We're a small shop, so choosing what to work on is a big deal.  There were all sorts of other important things that we could have worked on - improving our search engine, making our service more accessible to mobile users, improving new user experience, etc. - but we chose to focus on email, an older, less sexy format.

I'm always interested in hearing about the thought processes that drive other entrepreneurs' decisions, so I thought it might be interesting to share ours.  Here we go.

1) With a small team, we try and put resources into the things that are working (as opposed to things that aren't).  This philosophy applies not only to our own projects, but what we see when we look around the social media landscape.  Posterous is working.

2) We are constantly looking at ways to reduce the barriers to contributing content.  We've implemented Facebook Connect, we've experimented with delaying the registration prompt as long as possible, and we've tried other UI tweaks to make it easier and faster to contribute content.  We're enamored by the concept of "lazy registration."  With emailed reviews, the emailed review IS the registration.

3) Email still figures prominently in our referral logs, much more so than Facebook and Twitter.  Social distribution gets all the buzz, but based on our logs, email still dwarfs those channels as a distribution channel.  Clearly, people are very comfortable sharing content via email - why not let them post it as well?

4) Virtually everyone who is online is comfortable with email as a publishing UI.  By teaching our service to accept content from a universal UI, we hope to make it less of a scary proposition for new users to get involved with our site. 

5) Emailed reviews represents our first baby step towards being a mobile service.  Anyone with a smartphone can now post reviews on the go.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.  In the meantime, you can post a review of this blog - instantly - by sending an email HERE.

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Oh snap! Now I just copied you right back on Posterous: http://ericmatas.posterous.com/sexy-widget-why-we-copied-posterous

Well, and then on other places Posterous feeds: http://ericmatas.com

My take: I'm glad you are doing it! Thank you from a consumer who wants word-of-mouth to be easy to share.

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