VentureBeat

Posterous has announced a new way to share the sites created using its simple blogging tool — users can now embed them onto other websites as a widget.

Let’s say a user posts short messages and media to their Posterous blog, but also runs a blog for longer posts through a service like WordPress or Typepad. Posterous co-founder Garry Tan cites the example of venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, who uses Posterous for “all things longer than a tweet and smaller than a blogpost.” It’s a drag for readers to have to visit both sites, so now it’s possible to bring the two blogs together, by converting the Posterous blog into a widget that’s embedded on the main blog.

Of course, this announcement also illustrates the somewhat awkward, in-between position occupied by Posterous and its more-established competitor, Tumblr. Do people really need multiple blogs to accommodate different kinds of posts? For super tech-savvy folks, it’s nice to have all those options, but I imagine that for most people (including the casual audience that Posterous is aiming for), it can get a bit overwhelming. And indeed, Posterous would probably prefer to be your default blogging service; if users want to have other blogs too, the San Francisco startup says it’s “most useful” to use Posterous to autopost to those blogs, rather than embedding headlines. But some users wanted to keep their blogs separate, and Posterous is responding to their requests.

Posterous was incubated by Y Combinator and announced a $725,000 seed round last December. The new feature is accomplished through a partnership with widget-making service Widgetbox, where you can already find quite a few Tumblr widgets. I’ve embedded a widget for the Electric Ant Zine Blog, a comics-related blog that I occasionally contribute to, below.

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Tags: co:posterous, people:Garry Tan