Earlier this week, I decided to install the latest Postmatic beta on this site in order to give it a try. For those who aren’t familiar, Post Status has a great write up about it and you can watch the promotional video for it below:
In short, I think that anyone who manages a blog with any number of subscribers and commenters wants an easier way to manage their comments.
Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a few of us. But I know that I spend a significant portion of my day in my inbox, and I know that I try to respond to every comment that I get on this blog.
Sure, some fall through the cracks and that sucks, but having everything aggregated into email should alleviate that problem, right?
What is Postmatic?
The plugin does a number of things two of which are my favorite:
- Your content gets delivered to readers in an email. And they can comment just by hitting reply. No accounts. No forms. No browsers.
- Hit reply on any Postmatic email to comment on that post. You can send a reply on an existing post, too.
If you treat your inbox like a type of TODO list, then this fits in nicely with your workflow. I’d love to see this become a common way of managing comments on a WordPress-based blog.
As of the time of this writing, the plugin also has the ability to import all of your Jetpack subscribers. Straight from Jason from Postmatic:
Your Jetpack subscribers are kept in place and will always be there (since they live on wordpress.com).
So this means that if you opt to disable Postmatic, Jetpack is still good to go if you reactivate it.
What Does This Mean For This Site?
For now, it means very little:
- First, I’m going to be deactivating the plugin that gives readers the ability to subscribe to comments via email in favor of using Postmatic. I will be doing this on December 1st, 2014.
- Next, I am going to work to transition all of my Jetpack subscribers over to Postmatic (which should be easy enough given its latest features)
After that, I’m eager to hear feedback from those of you who receive the emails via Postmatic and who end up commenting via Postmatic, as well.
Anyway, in the meantime, everything will continue as normal until December 1st, 2014. After that, the switch is being flipped and we’ll see how it all goes!
I like what I see. I may switch ChurchMag, too. I have never been happy with the solutions offered—and this was the ONLY feature that Disqus ever had that tempted me from walking away from native WordPress commenting. But this? This is cool. Great find and share, Tom. :D
Thanks, Tom! What a nice post to wake up to.
We are still in public beta but will be launching 1.0 within a month or so.
We especially welcome signups from any fellow WordPress developers, evangelists, or community members. We can always use a few more sets of eyes. You can request a key by installing directly from the repo and hitting Settings > Postmatic. Thanks!
I’m loving Postmatic too! We are deploying is here: http://schmoovies.com/ which uses WP as its platform and Postmatic seems like a really natural tool for that particular site. It’s not a blog, but it feels great knowing that replies to commentary can be done without ever visiting the site, or loading a dedicated mobile. When I tested it, I remember thinking, “Jesus, this is practically magic.” I’ve been really impressed at the speed the comments get posted to the site – it was faster than I could click to it after sending the email. Not to mention the fact that Jason has been wonderful with support. He is really on to creating a great product with this!
Awww, that’s great! Practically magic?!?!?! Yea, we’re pretty proud of how low we’ve been able to get our post times down. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t always the case that it was as quick as it is now. We just rolled out major improvements in the last 3 or so weeks.
In most cases we now see between 6 and 12 seconds between the time you send the email and the time the comment gets posted. It has to be this way… it’d be unfair to let the folks engaging over email fall behind the curve of those on the web. This way everyone is on the same page, all the time.