Last Sunday I spent some time with Steve Rubel, who is singlehandedly elevating Posterous to fame. A while ago I was asked by my friend Bill Reichert at Garage whether I thought Posterous would ever catch on, and I told him that even though it was easy, there were already too many blogging tools out there. I felt pretty smug when I said it, because I have been blogging since 1999 (and even before, although it wasn't a blog, it was an E-Zine).

I was wrong; I suck. Tonight I was going through Google Reader and came upon Robert Scoble's Posterous-- his post about the valuation of Twitter, which was all the rage this weekend. But this was the first time I realized he had put it on Posterous.

[You have to understand that last night I spent the evening secretly making my OWN Posterous, because of that Rubel conversation, which took place at Scoble's house. I finally had to try it.  I resisted, because I already have a Tumblr, which i use to store my Tweets, and four or five blogs. I was so busy being industrious that I didn't even know Robert had beat me to it. Crap.]

My first impression is that Posterous works backwards from Tumblr and Friendfeed, and I didn't know that until last night. Tumblr and Friendfeed can take everything IN, as indeed Facebook and Twitter kind-of-can, but Posterous puts things OUT. I'm not even sure it can take things in. I think you have to start with Posterous as the hub.

Now watch what's going to happen to me as I post this to Posterous.  It will go out to Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. Then it will start bouncing off these services and going endlessly back and forth in a recusive loop, because when I set these services up years ago, I forgot what fed to what. I've got all kinds of makeshift bridges going that I'm sure I've overlooked, and you are going to see everything three times (or more).

Until I find a service that can merge and purge my duplicate status updates and posts, I don't think I can use Posterous. There's a limit to ubiquity.

Let me know how many times you see this:-)