Sachin's Space

My life: London, LA, Stanford, Phi Psi, Apple, New York City, Posterous, San Francisco, Kate, Twitter.

Use Posterous at Graduation to Create an Instant, Collaborative Event Photo Album

Before you hit the ceremonies and post-grad party scene, make sure your iPhone is photo-ready with the best iPhone app for group celebrations. Posterous for the iPhone lets you create a event photo album to which everyone attending your event can share, instantly and effortlessly. It’s perfect for graduation because all the photos are showcased in a beautiful archive for later viewing.
via blog.posterous.com

I wish something like Posterous had existed when I was in college. Every class I was in, every dorm I lived in, every group I was a part of had an email list. But it was a dumb list serve, and I have none of those emails today.

How cool would it be if today I could:

  • View the photos everyone took at each dorm I lived in
  • See the old handouts and assignments from the classes I took
  • Relive the memories from all the amazing basketball and football games I attended

It's 2011 and it's still too hard to share photos together.

But we're getting there. You can use Posterous for the iPhone to create a collaborative photo site based around a location. Very cool for an event like graduation! Check it out.

More info is here.

My wedding website is online. And it's built entirely on Posterous.

Kate and I are getting married in September, so we needed a wedding website. Wedding website creation services are a disaster. Most seem like they were built 5 years ago and never updated.

I decided to run our entire site on Posterous. It's an easy way to have a fully customizable site that both Kate and I can update. Kate designed all the graphics and icons, and Posterous theme designer Cory Watilo created the website and Posterous theme. Thanks, Cory!

There are two main components to our site that make it stand out:

1. There's a blog. But here's the cool part: I added all our wedding guests as subscribers to the blog. So when we post updates about the wedding, hotel, or flights, all our guests will get that information automatically by email. Most people don't check websites or RSS feeds.

2. Our guestbook is a "post by moderation" Posterous site. That means anyone can post photos and video by emailing post@kateandsachin.com. Our guests can update it now, live during the wedding, and they can send their photos there after the event.

We had to "hack" a couple things to make this work, like use tags to create static pages. But for the most part, this is a Posterous site anyone can build. Maybe we should go after this market :).

Check out the site, let me know what you think!

http://kateandsachin.com

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When you're building a company, you sometimes have to leave your original user base behind and focus on mass appeal

See, Twitter decided early on that it wasn't going to pander to its original base. Smartly, Twitter decided to ignore the demands of edge-case geek users like Robert Scoble, and instead focus on mass appeal, celebrities, and building out the core platform. The robust and easy-to-use Twitter API has spurred a flourishing ecosystem of third-party apps.

Tumblr's doing the opposite. Rather than focusing on expanding its audience and making it into a valuable platform, it's coiling in on itself, doubling down on the un-monetizable memes that its core users love -- like pictures of sharks and cats. A non-Tumblr user joining the site would have no idea what the fascination with cats and sharks is all about. It's totally self-referential.

 

via businessinsider.com

An interesting article about how Tumblr is really focusing on their core user base and adding features *those users* find valuable.

This is definitely an important concern when building a new company, but not as black and white as this post makes it seem. Posterous was always meant to have mass appeal, get millions of *new* people blogging. But at the same time, we have to take care of the early adopters, without them we wouldn't be here today.

We've had to make some hard decisions already, to work on features that will really help us grow rather than features that are fun or were requested by a prominent user. This is only going to get harder from here. It's all about balance.

Very exciting day! Released our first iPhone app, PicPosterous. Makes it easier than ever to post photos online

PicPosterous was my pet project. I really wanted to do some iPhone development and build a better way to publish photos. I wasn't completely satisfied with the the workflow of posting photos via email. Yeah, that's what Posterous is all about, but I felt it needed to be better.

So just as Posterous came about to fill our personal need for better web publishing, PicPosterous was built to solve my own publishing frustrations.

  • Why is my Camera app separate from the app I use to post online (Mail)? 
  • I just want all the photos I take to get posted, automatically 
  • I want to build sets of photos as I take them, not at the end 
  • Basically, I want to remove the explicit "Ok, now I need to post these" 

I designed PicPosterous to replace the Camera app on my iPhone. PicPosterous is my camera in the cloud, it's connected, it breaks down the separation of shooting photos and posting photos. If I could delete Camera from my phone, I would.
 
I've been using the app for a couple months now while it was still under development. When the first Posterous prototype was built, the number of photos on my blog went up 10x. Similarly, I'm now posting more photos thanks to PicPosterous.

You can see my photo site here:

http://sachinhd.posterous.com/

I used the app a ton on my last trip to New York. I created an album for each restaurant/bar/attraction I went to and posted the photos as I took them. By the end of the weekend, my photos were already organized and published online:

http://sachinhd.posterous.com/?page=5
http://sachinhd.posterous.com/?page=6
http://sachinhd.posterous.com/?page=7
http://sachinhd.posterous.com/?page=8
 
Developing for the iPhone was a really great experience. The SDK and development tools are phenomenal. I prefer desktop and mobile development over web stuff. There were some really interesting details to tackle with iPhone development:

  • The iPhone is very resource limited. It's slow and has little memory 
  • I threaded *everything*. The app basically never blocks 
  • Uploads queue and resume if you quit the app and relaunch (or get a phone call) 
  • PicPosterous was designed to let you shoot as fast as possible, and let everything else happen in the background
  • You can even take photos and video with no internet. They will queue for upload later
  • The app is fast, smooth, and stable

If you haven't already, please download it here.
 
Many thanks to Kate for designing the awesome icon!

Icon_512

We got offices in North Beach. I guess we're not cool enough to be in SOMA. I sound like one of the new Microsoft ads

We've looked at a lot of office space in the past few weeks. Locations fell into 3 buckets:

1. SOMA. SOMA (south of market) is where all the cool, new web 2.0 companies are based. Twitter is there, and a whole slew of Y Combinator startups. Places we saw were generally awkward or expensive. People are sharing space with lots of companies, many guys all piled into small rooms.

But I don't get the appeal. There's nothing around there. The food SUCKS. It's like, the place to be because it's "cool" but really, there are better places. Everyone is quoting "$1 per square foot!" but when you actually find space, it's a lot more expensive than that.

Believe me, i'm not going to overpay just so I can be a little closer to Twitter HQ.

2. Financial District. We saw some REALLY sweet spaces around Union Square. Places have been empty for a while and people are willing to negotiate on rent pretty liberally. Unfortunately places were just a little too large and too expensive for what we need. But in a year, I can totally see us growing into an office there. And there's good food to eat!

3. North Beach. It's a little more out of the way from transportation like Bart. But it's a beautiful neighborhood with LOTS of great food. And since we have a connection with a building owner there (my girlfriend, Kate, works in a building with openings), we got a sweet deal on a space that's the perfect size for us.

So we'll be in North Beach starting August 1st. I'm really looking forward to setting up the office, in particular building a kegerator. I've wanted my own kegerator ever since I started drinking (good) beer. When I learned Brett shares the same love, we decided this is a must for Posterous HQ. Not that North Beach is lacking in great bars...

The best legal team in the business

I was walking back from my haircut this afternoon and passed the Orrick offices in SOMA.

Photo

On the Orrick website, I saw that the 4 lawyers we have been working most closely with have degrees from Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Hastings, UCLA, Berkeley, UPenn and Columbia. Quite a list. We even have a former Cupertino mayor in the mix.
 
People usually dread working with lawyers, but i've really enjoyed all the time I've spent with ours. I highly recommend them. Don't mess with Posterous!