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Filed under: requests

What's missing from Piictu

I have been playing with Piictu for a few days now and I must say I am liking it. You can't really compare it to instagram, picplz or path but it has something about it - a different approach that I think is interesting. The idea of sorting piics (how they call pics and pic-replies) by topics/headlines in so called streams feels like groups that everyone can follow and add their pics to. I still want to point out a few things I am missing, mainly usability issues and some features that would make the overall experience a lot better. 

But first some screenshots:

(download)

Now, some things that don't feel right to me:

  • tapping on stream "buttons" results in frustration, cause nothing happens - this should bring up a list of those streams
  • the activity stream won't let you tap on an activity to get to that user or the picture they liked (uservoice vote)
  • new activities are indicated by a nice green numbertag on the lower right profile icon when you launch the app. you have to tap here and then tap on the upper right icon to get to the new activites. one tap too much.
  • why not share who liked someones piics by being able to doubletap the heart icon or something similar?

And things I am missing:

  • search for exisiting streams. I guess there are dozens or hundreds of duplicates already. (uservoice vote)
  • search for users (uservoice vote)
  • share piics on twitter or facebook later. not only when uploading them to piictu (uservoice vote)
  • add piics to multiple streams without having to upload them again
  • tagging with hashtags would be nice
  • push notifications (for all kinds of new activities) (uservoice vote for likes)
  • what about comments? too much to ask maybe :) (uservoice vote)
  • you can't see a date/time of the uploads

 

 

i wish you could add pics to an existing set at posterous

I wish you could add pictures to a set and delete some in a set here at posterous. Sometimes i collect screenshots for example and want to add some later. Sometimes I prefer keeping them here, not at flickr etc. because i like that it's just one entry and not many for all the pictures. 

PicPosterous on the iPhone lets you add pics to an album later, but only if you created it on the iPhone. I hope they consider adding this feature to the web also. 

comparing typepads to posterous' bookmarklet

Yesterday posterous updated it's bookmarklet with an enhanced tagging functionality. That's a neat timesaver! But thinking about the bookmarklet i am still missing one thing that I just saw TypoPad has.
In the settings you can choose which sites to post to by default and when using the bookmarklet you can check each one of these sites, no need to uncheck "autopost everywhere" all the time.

Why do i need that? I am saving stuff i like in my other posterous (assbachbm).
Sometimes i want to add these bookmarks to delicious as well, or maybe even to twitter, facebook and delicious. But not always all of them, you see?

(download)

 

there's a tags field when posting from the web (and the bookmarklet)

I just saw that if you post by web there is a "tags"-field with auto-completion.

Tagging

Is that new? I usually post by email and haven't seen this before. When you edit a post it's not there, although i think it would be nice to have it here. (correction it actually IS there, when you click "more post editing options" sorry for that.)

Even more important for me i'd love to have a tags-field with auto-completion in the bookmarklet ... as well as some other things mentioned before (ability to choose where to autopost etc) :) 

Anyway, glad i found this.

edit: oh my, i totally missed this post, so, ... thank you Posterous! :)

social bookmarking with posterous?!

When i first saw that you can autopost to delicious i thought i should try posterous as a new social bookmarking service.

I am using mento since 15 months now but it's lacking some things i long for and it seems that it's not being worked on anymore, so no improvements and new features in sight. Luckily i have always sent my bookmarks to delicous as well (mento offers this through the api), so there is kind of a backup and quicker way to search through them. I have a need to search through my old bookmarks from time to time or through those of my network, when i think "man, there was this site but i can't remember the name or URL...". Mentos search result page is not very helpful in this case unfortunately, very confusing and unclear with duplicates so i mostly used delicious when searching. 

So why not use delicious in the first place? Well, for me delicious is definately missing a visual glance at the bookmarks. A thumbnail, screenshot, logo,... Mento has this, posterous has this. You can easily add images with their bookmarklets. Yesterday i tested delish, a mac OSX desktop app, but it's very slow and it only shows you the thumbnails which are created "on the fly", so it's only about half the deal.

Well okay, having screenshots is not everything. What am i looking for exactly? How do i use mento nowadays and what should posterous have to fulfill my need here? 

I use Mentos Firefox plugin when i use Firefox and the bookmarklet in Safari. The plugin has some more features but the bookmarklet is okay in most cases. When there is no nice visual on the page i want to bookmark i use skitch to upload a screenshot of the prefered area to mento first, the uploaded picture is shown with the next bookmark then automatically. This btw was a great great feature Greg implemented! Mentos bookmarklet lets you add tagschannels and descriptions, gives you a chance to directly share this link with a network friend (or a facebook contact) or via twitter. This is something i am missing with the posterous bookmarklet: Adding tags directly. 

Network: my Mento network consists of a few very likeminded people whose boomarks i like a lot, early adopters, designers, coders, people that like and need the same things i do. Posterous does make it easy to follow people and create a new network, even though i am missing something like channels, topic groups and explore pages to find new people and content, to have a bigger feeling of a community and a togetherness. Edit: i just found there actually is an explore page.

Autoposting to delicious creates a bookmark to the posterous article not the target. This could be very confusing for people searching and finding my bookmarks at delicious, it's about sharing, so i want it to be nice not only for myself. Another fact is that you can send exclusively to delicious only via email (not the bookmarklet) or by autoposting to delicious later, when the post has already been published. 

By default "autopost everywhere" is checked in posterous' bookmarklet and it's hidden behind the "advanced options" link. I do not want to flood all my linked networks like facebook, twitter, friendfeed, tumblr with this as well, but it would happen once i forget to uncheck and select the right posterous from the list ( i want to use a seperate blog for the bookmarks )

I think posterous' search would do the job for me, although i would love to have a quick result view with only the titles listed as well (not only but as an option, see delicious). I know, this is the exact opposite of my wish for screenshots but sometimes this is handy. 

But that is about it i think. Anything else here at posterous feels so supersmooth that it makes me smile each time i use it. It's easy as 1-2-3 with the ability to send everything in via email and Garry and Sachin really seem to be nice guys listening to their users.

I already exchanged some thoughts about this whole topic here at Andy's posterous (german). 

Please leave your comments if you have ideas or solutions... thanks alot for reading!