Etsy is quietly one of the world's most popular websites. Buying, selling, and talking about crafts and handmade items is apparently big business. Behind the scenes though, it's been rocky. After drama over Etsy's leadership in August 2008, two of its founders, Haim Schoppik and Chris Maguire, left the company along with a number of employees. Since then, we haven't heard much. So what have they been up to?
Building a social media company, it seems. We were recently informed about a new project by Etsy's Haim, Chris, and David (former Etsy product manager). That project is Postling, a "tool for small businesses to market, listen, and respond to their customers using social media." So what exactly have the Etsy founders built?
Postling Does Its Job, But...
When we first arrived on Postling, one company immediately came to mind: Ping.fm, the tool that lets you update all of your social media accounts all at once. Postling performs a similar function. The goal of the new social tool is to simplify social media for businesses by making it easy to post to not only a company blog, but to Twitter, Flickr, and a range of other social media websites.
Postling seems to provide a rich media interface to create, edit, and build blog posts. After they're published (Wordpress, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger, and others are options), you can then update your status on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere in one swoop. The last step is that you can post your photos to Flickr from the interface.
That's really about it. It doesn't have the FriendFeed ability to receive information from these social networks, something that would make the service a lot more useful. It's essentially a beefed-up version of Ping.fm for business, which is why they don't offer this product for free. Postling costs $9 a month.