Some Privacy, Please? Posterous Adds Privacy Controls to 'Spaces'
You already dance like nobody's watching. Now you can now post like nobody's reading. I'm talking about new privacy features on Posterous - real ones. Posterous won the hearts of many social media newbies by letting them update their blogs via email. The latest improvements to the site have to do with how the information you post is viewed and shared by others.
You already dance like nobody’s watching. Now you can now post like nobody’s reading. I’m talking about new privacy features on Posterous – real ones. Posterous won the hearts of many social media newbies by letting them update their blogs via email. In December 2011 the blogging service rolled out Spaces, a redesign of its old format with some bonus features like embeddable tweets and a Popular feed for discovering other blogs. The latest improvements to the site have to do with how the information you post is viewed and shared by others.
The announcement came with some interesting statistics about why these controls matter. Harris Interactive surveyed over 2,000 social media users and discovered the following:
- 44% want to create a place where they could only share with their close friends and family.
- 42% want to be more careful with what they shared online.
- 36% want more control over who can see what they shared.
I logged in to see how well Posterous’ new privacy features addressed these issues. I couldn’t email my privacy controls to my account, but setting up a new space was pretty easy. With the click of a button I could make the blog completely private, share it just with people I invite, or make it public. If I chose to make the site private, I could invite people via email only. Otherwise, I could connect the account with sites like Facebook and Twitter to search for friends.
Posterous Spaces is reminiscent of the blog function on MySpace, both in name and in spirit. MySpace even had a privacy setting for its blogs. But your friends were still be able to see that you had a blog and that it was set to private. (This had also been a problem for me on Path, where my friends on Facebook could automatically see that I had joined.) Creating a blog away from your main social media site takes away the awkwardness of having a padlock on your wall to exclude your friends.
I liked that I could also add sharing buttons for Twitter and Google+1 separately, because allowing people to tweet or recommend your posts to their friends and followers is the opposite of a privacy feature.
There were also privacy controls on the comments. I would have liked to see some controls for individual users, but being able to moderate the comments, limit them to logged-in users, or disable them altogether worked well enough for the purposes of a private blog.
All of these choices were built into the set-up process so I didn’t have to go back later and change any automatic settings I didn’t like.
With so many people on the Internet now, it’s hard to please everybody all the time. There is an audience for just about any blog, from “Things I Did Last Night at 3:00 a.m.” to “Adventures in Potty Training,” but not everyone on your Facebook page is going to relate to or appreciate stories about projectile vomit in either context. That’s why it’s nice to have a place like Posterous where you can post updates about your family, your hobbies, or your clubs and schools, without having to filter them for a general audience.
Image by valdis torms via Shutterstock
