Postful On Cell Phones
April 26, 2007
Many companies are working hard to release mobile versions of their applications. While we respect their labors, we don’t envy them. Luckily for us, Postful already runs on just about every cell phone out there.
If your phone supports e-mail, you’re set. Blackberries are a snap. Palm or Windows Mobile? No problem. Just send an e-mail and Postful will work its magic.
Most camera phones can send mms messages to e-mail accounts (just find out or set your phone’s e-mail alias and set is as Postful account alias).
But let’s say you’re on an older phone. SMS is still all you need. These instructions will vary slightly from provider to provider. For T-Mobile, send an SMS to 500 (Cingular is apparently 121) with the Postful address you wish to send to as the start of the message. Follow it with a space and type your message. As before, you’ll have to setup a Postful alias with your cell phone’s e-mail address (for T-Mobile, it would be yourphonenumber@tmomail.net).
It’s really that easy.
How would you use this? Snap a picture, add a quick comment, and mail it off to your grandmother. At the scene of an accident, capture the image and mail it to your insurance company (or yourself for a hard-copy) in one step.
But, as always, we expect to be surprised by the uses you come up with!
Personal Publishing With Postful
April 25, 2007
Print publishers are working to personalize the content they deliver to their subscribers. While they adjust from the top down, our users are creating personalized publications from the ground up. Mass customization is coming to the print industry from both directions, and it’s fun to see.
Wired ran a promotion last month asking readers to submit cover photos for their July issue. They’ll be producing 5,000 different covers from those photos. It’s an exciting experiment in reader interaction, but it falls short of what they describe as the “Holy Grail” of print media: personalized and targeted publication.
We saw another example of this with the issue of Reason where every subscriber received a personal edition with a satellite photo of their home on the cover. More intriguingly, Reason customized certain articles and ads based on the subscriber’s location.
I know from personal experience that this is an extremely difficult process. I spent a few too many nights sleeping on a print-shop floor working on the Reason cover. Despite the potential, it’s been hard to overcome the technical challenges. And efforts have been limited to the occasional test or promotion.
Postful’s users, meanwhile, are delivering extremely targeted publications at a very small scale. We already have users sending print copies of their blog articles to relatives who aren’t online. Some have automated this process with rss-to-email feeds or even compiled posts into mini-newsletters.
The potential for this is exciting. There aren’t too many steps from personal newsletter to small magazine. While the larger magazines work through the logistical intricacies of personalizing a product designed for mass runs of hundreds of thousands, the smaller ones can scale upward with a product meant from the start for individuals. Meanwhile, both can make use of the same web-based ad marketplace.
I don’t know whether the large magazines will adapt before the next generation of dynamic newsletters and magazines establishes itself. The one thing that’s certain is that the print world is changing. As I’ve said before, print isn’t dying, but the media apparatus built around it is. Print is just a delivery vehicle, one that is finally being incorporated into our digital life. We’re proud to have Postful play a part in that.
It will be fun to see how this develops as our users lead the way forward.
photo credit: Gastev
Web 2.0 Needs to Get Physical
April 19, 2007
Those of us in software development effectively live in front of our computers. In turn, we design software to make it easier to interact using only a computer. In that process, we forget that most of the world runs on offline services and processes.
Most of these are shockingly inefficient.
The tools, methods, and patterns we’ve developed while building the structure of the web ecosystem could be an immense service to these areas. But, in order to apply these patterns, we need interfaces. Links to physical production tools, sensors, and physical tracking systems.
This is a hard task. It blends together skills in a number of areas and requires that companies be able to work across those boundaries seamlessly.
The benefit is that it allows the world of physical products and interactions to gain the richness of customization and efficiencies of the online realm.
Come Back From San Francisco
April 19, 2007
Some of the team was up at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week.
We discovered a few companies there that look mighty interesting. MAPLight is putting together a database and visualization tool to see the relationship between campaign contributions and votes. Swivel, a place to share your data, launched officially at the show. We’re excited by the possibilities. In the same way that online photo sharing makes it easy for bloggers to add photography to their posts, Swivel makes it easy to add data. The web just got smarter. Do I hear MAPLight/Swivel mashup? Yes I do!
Also caught a great presentation from ThinkFree, which unveiled APIs for embedding document viewers and editors in your own web applications. This could become the killer tool for Office 2.0. Suddenly applications that could only be imagined before become easy and practical. We can’t wait to give them a test-drive ourselves.
And there’s also this firm from Washington. They say they’ve got an OS. What was it called? Doors? Hinges? I forget.
For all of our users whom we met at the show, it was great saying hello and seeing you in person!
One feature request that has come up again and again in your feedback is the request to send mail from more than one e-mail address. We’ve heard from those of you who check different e-mail at home rather than at the office, and would like to use Postful from either place.
So we have launched a new feature. We call them aliases. Aliases are just a list of other e-mail addresses that you would like to send ground mail from.
Just log in, and click on Aliases under the Account menu. You’ll be able to create them there.
You can also use aliases to set up a Postful account that your whole family can use. Just add your kids’ e-mail addresses as aliases, and they will be able to send mail, while you take care of the payments.
As always, we encourage everyone in the beta to kick the tires on this feature and let us know any changes you’d like us to make.
The Postful Week One Review
April 12, 2007
Well, Postful Private Beta is now officially one week old. I just wanted to say, on behalf of the Postful team: it’s been incredible.
First, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for your comments and your feedback. Positive or negative, criticism or compliments, please keep them coming. It’s been exhilarating and insightful. Talking to you guys after a long, hard slog of development has really reminded us of why we love this business.
Now, there have been lots of feature requests, and we’ve got plenty of wonderful things on our development docket. For the next couple of months, expect a major new feature from us once every couple of weeks. And, of course, stay tuned to this blog, where we’ll be making all our announcements.
Postful in the News
April 10, 2007
Shameless, I know, but I thought I’d put up some links to early discussions of the Postful beta. This is a very exciting phase for any startup, as you begin to get broad feedback from early users and reviewers. Suddenly, the hypotheticals about what’s important and how people will respond are replaced by very direct feedback.
In any case, I’d love to put up links to all the sites that have pointed to us, but I’ll content myself with giving you a few samples:
- CNET TV (about 1:30 in)
- Download Squad
- Mashable
Do You Need a Printer?
April 9, 2007
There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT (my apologies to future visitors, I know this will probably be behind the wall).
One quote from an HP executive caught my eye:
He said one of his daughters, a college student, had told him, “I don’t need a printer.” Like many people of her generation, she lives online and finds it unnecessary or too difficult to put bits onto paper.
Many of us are in that position. Before Postful, I’d been nursing an old laser printer for many years. Given the small volume of printing I did, it would have been hard to justify getting a new one. I would have rather had full color and the high quality of the newest models, but it wasn’t worth it. Printing photos (warning: large file) just wasn’t an option.
All of this means that it is just getting more and more difficult and expensive to do-it-yourself with printing. This is really where Postful comes in. We let you produce the same quality you’d get if you were spending thousands on a printer and half an hour on each document in seconds, for a fraction of the cost.
Most people don’t need a printer, what they need is to send a letter or get a copy of a picture to put on their wall. The shift has already taken place where most people are printing fewer items but requiring more quality in those they do print. Postful and other web printing services are positioned to take advantage of the shift to convenient, high-quality services and away from printing as a consumer activity.
HP won’t stop doing printing business. They make beautiful digital presses (even though for now we’re using Xerox). Printing isn’t dead, but the personal printer may be on it’s way out. The transition is one that HP seems to be recognizing and preparing for both as a equipment vendor and as a service provider (Snapfish, Tabblo).
Ask Postful: Advertising and Branding
April 9, 2007
Ben posed some excellent questions in the comments to a previous post. Some I’m going to conspicuously leave unanswered for a few days, but let me deal with the first now:
here’s what I’d like to see:
1. A photograph of what a finished letter looks like. I don’t want to send a Postful letter if it’s got advertising or your branding all over it; I’m pretty sure you’re not doing this, but I want to be certain. Basically, I want to know my letters will look professional.
All we send is your letter inside an envelope with the recipient’s address, your return address, and a stamp. I’m putting up links to pdf’s of two sample letters (once again, thanks to Matthew for producing these samples during testing). The first is a text only letter, the second includes photos (warning: this is a large file). Here’s a very low-res pic of a printed letter and envelope (I’ll update with a higher quality shot).
These show you what we print: no added branding or advertising.
Some people are using Postful for personal letters and don’t want their grandparents getting an envelope of ads from them. Others are using it for business where advertising and branding is simply not an option. We will always provide a clean letter, branding- and advertising-free, just like you’d send yourself.
Ask Postful: Mailing Timeline
April 8, 2007
Q: How long does it take you to mail a letter?
A: Our eventual goal is to have any e-mail that enters the system by 3pm PST go out the same day.
Right now, we’re still adjusting our production process so we aren’t quite at that point yet. Our aim today is to have any e-mail entering the system out within 24 hours (excluding weekends for the moment). Over the next several months we’ll be steadily decreasing that turn-around time as we approach our target (hopefully not asymptotically).
