Last week, Tech Crunch broke the story about the release of a new social media scheduling app called Postcard. Working “in the industry” I’ve had a lot of experience with these types of tools, and I have to say Postcard is one of the first in a long time to get me excited about what could be possible for social media automation in the future.
In fact, I was so intrigued, I decided to invite with the app’s developer, Kyle Newsome, for a chat about Postcard, and how it came to be.
Q1: Lets get straight into it – what is Postcard?
Postcard is a social sharing multi-tool built around the idea of standardizing social media communications and letting users achieving better content control. I kind of like to think of it as a Swiss Army knife for sharing social content.
Q2: Give me some background; what made you decide to build this app?
I have a personal website and enjoy blogging, but I rarely have time to post in long form. Meanwhile I’m posting a mixture of personal and professional content on social networks every single day. It started to feel like a shame there wasn’t a good way to do it all at once.
I also felt that too many companies are trying to be the next Facebook, or providing tools for managing popular networks. But too few are trying to solve the issue of content ownership. It seems to me like social networking needs to be a more open and standardized form of communication. We started doing it with email over 40 years ago!
Q3: What are some of the key features for the app?
There are two really key features that spawn a wide variety of uses:
- You can post content to your own website. I’ve created an open source protocol for social communications, so that anyone can turn their website into a personal/private social network. Better yet, there’s already a WordPress plugin that makes it easy for users to start directly storing and displaying their social content! (http://wordpress.org/plugins/postcard-social/)
- Postcard includes a ‘Host’ feature that let’s you set one network as the content’s home and all remaining networks link to that original content. If you’re posting to your own website and want to draw traffic, this is a great way to do so.
Q4: You only launched last week, but what’s the response been like so far?
So far response has been really positive. I’ve heard from a number of people and none of them have identical stories for how Postcard is helping them. I’ve really enjoyed talking with users. I’m also getting a lot of requests for Android support, which is definitely in the game plan.
Q5: So who should download this app right now? – like ten minutes ago?
Here’s the top three reasons to download Postcard:
- If you’re someone who likes to cross-post sometimes but not other times. That’s a really straightforward reason Postcard is great for almost anybody.
- If you have multiple twitter accounts, some of which frequently retweet the other, you should get this app and try using the ‘Host’ feature. You can tweet and get retweets from your other accounts all in one post.
- If you’ve got a WordPress website and want direct control of your social content, that’s another great reason.
Q6: What are the plans for the future? Can you divulge?
Better cross platform support and integration with more web frameworks is one direction I want to go. I think that the custom network feature will have increasing relevance in the coming years. While I can’t divulge all the angles I see it from quite yet, I do think it’s possible that in the future people might send a message to their personal website, a private family social network and a friend’s network all in one go. That would be a big shift in the way we think about social networking from today.
I would like to extend a big thanks to Kyle for lending me his time. For more info and to download the app head to http://www.postcardsocial.net/.
