After reading where Steve Rubel had switched his lifestreaming to Posterous I decided to take at the application look myself.  I'm a web app junky - and my social apps are unmanageable and often ignored.  I regularly (more or less) use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube and FriendFeed.  I used to be addicted to FriendFeed, but as I got away from the more technical aspects of the internet I became less enamoured - there just weren't many people I wanted to follow on a regular basis.  Then there were my three blogs - two Tumblr blogs - one for my business with CSS, web design and marketing tips, the other a more personal one with stuff I found cool, and my personal blog.  It was just too much to keep up with.

Additionally, there was the problem of noise, which was mostly my own fault.  When I twittered my tweet would show up on Facebook, but would also change my Facebook status.  Since Friendfeed picks up both Twitter and Facebook, there would be at least two posts there.  A mess.

So this morning I cleaned out Facebook and turned off everything external that could communicate with it; updating RSS feeds, updating status, showing Flickr photos, etc. Now it will be updated only by Posterous.  I imported everything from both Tumblr blogs into my Posterous blog.  From now on Posterous will:

• Update Twitter
• Post to Facebook
• Post to Chicken Teriyaki Bowl #7
  
• Post photos to Flickr, my blog and Facebook

And I can manage where I want everything to go just by email!  For example: flickr@posterous.com will post a photo to Flickr, but not to Facebook or my blog.  I can even type flickr+facebook@posterous.com to post a photo to both at the same time!

But here's why I really love Posterous:  the customer service.  I was peeved because I couldn't send pictures from my phone to Posterous.  I'm not web-enabled, but I can send emails using SMS.  I couldn't find a solution on the site, so I Googled and sure enough, someone else had the save problem.  They had contacted customer service with the cell phone email address that the photos were coming from and customer service manually activated it.  So I sent off an email and immediately got a response that the email had been activated!  This totally rocks especially since he didn't scold me.  You see, if you have Posterous set up for SMS and then send an email it will guess that it is from the same person and ask you confirm it, thereby activating that email.  I had failed to send the "hello" SMS to set it up correctly and then just didn't wait long enough for the confirmation to appear.

Posterous is free and their blog says they will be adding additional features for a premium in the future.