14 DAY TRIAL // The email based web publishing platform Posterous is adding services and functionality at a blistering pace. Already supporting a large number of publishing services, blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc., it is now adding the possibility to embed Google Maps widgets in your posts as well as geolocation support. Embedding maps is now as easy as pasting the URL of the Google Maps location to your email, and Posterous takes care of the rest.
“Embedding a Google Map in one of your posts could not be simpler. Just grab the map link from Google Maps and drop it on its own line into your email or our web based post editor. We'll expand it into an interactive map for you,” Brett Gibson wrote on the Posterous blog. “What's more, Posterous is now taking advantage off all the location data that you're sending us encoded in your images.“
Adding geolocation information to images is automatic but the behavior is disabled by default, for those concerned about privacy, and can be enabled separately for every blog. If the functionality is enabled the service will try to recover the geolocation information and add it to your post along with an optional mini-map.
Posterous also recently added the possibility to automatically post feed stories to your Facebook page when you create a post on your blog. The feature does require a Posterous account but after this every post will also get a Facebook entry featuring some of the photos and the text from the post. Currently, due to Facebook's platform limitation, photo and video streams can't be added.
The service was launched in 2008 and is already becoming popular thanks to the multitude of features and the simplicity of its approach. Everything can be done with an email and creating a whole post requires no great technical know-how. The subject line becomes the post's title, the content of the email will be the body of the post and every photo, video and now even map widgets will be added automatically.