Although we predicted at the Technology Blog of Capgemini that e-mail would die this year it seems it is rather persistent. However besides overloading people with e-mails and setup a competition “Who is the person who could CC the most people”, there is one good thing you can do with it: use it with Posterous.
Meet Posterous
Posterous is a service that distributes its content in a way that seems to be uncool at first sight. Simple: sending e-mail is not something the cool kids do, everybody is sending e-mail on a daily basis. Therefore my first feelings about Posterous were that it was totally not cool or useful. We are struggling with an immense amount of e-mails (with only a small percentage that is really useful) and then there is Posterous, a new service that seems to be e-mail centric.
By using such an uncool medium as e-mail, Posterous is quite cool. It is a really easy way to send your content to a lot of networks. It is an easy method to get people to start a blog or to share their photos and videos on several sites. Often senior management does not get what a blog is, or how sites like YouTube, Flickr or Twitter work, however they are masters of their inbox and understand e-mail very well. Now these people can also blog, they do not have to learn a new trick, they only have to e-mail to a certain e-mail address. The only thing they have to be aware of, is the results of sending a simple e-mail to Posterous
For the digital illiterated
Besides an easy introduction to social media for the digital illiterated, e-mail is also a service that is not blocked in most offices or countries (while something like Facebook or YouTube is often blocked). E-mail to certain domains is hardly ever blocked, and at almost every device that has an internet connection you will have the possibility to send an email to Posterous and distribute your content.
But still: it’s e-mail. So it’s a bit uncool.