Update: In 2012, Twitter bought Posterous, and killed it one year later. I am now using Tumblr as an alternative. Works just as good. Until one of the big boys will buy Tumblr of course…

One of the great many things one can use Twitter for, is to share pictures “on-the-fly” with your social community: From about anywhere in the world, I can take a picture with my mobile phone and within seconds post it on Twitter, for all my followers to see.

The most popular picture-posting tool is Twitpic. This free Twitter utility converts pictures Emailed from your mobile phone into a post. Each time a new picture is posted, a link to it is automatically tweeted from your Twitter account.

I started using Twitpic about a year ago, and in the mean time, racked up about 300 pictures on my Twitpic account. Each of them had between 30 and 50 viewers. Some pictures were funny, informative, sweet, frustrating or inspiring. Some are taken from the mountains, at sea level or while boarding a plane…

I should say, it became pretty addictive, but in a good way. I started to be more attentfull for the beauty around me. At first, because I looked for something to Twitpic, later on, I started to feel more open to the beauty and uniqueness of every little thing around me.

Anyway… enough spiritual stuff. Back to the technical part! I liked Twitpic. It was for free, but went down from time to time. I wondered if I would be able to make a tool like this, using off-the-shelf blog software, and using my own domain name.

While making my series “How to select your blog platform”, I stumbled upon Posterous. Similar to Tumblr, it is not a full blown blogplatform like Blogger, WordPress or Typepad. Nor is it a microblogging service like Twitter or Identi.ca. No, I would call Posterous a “mini-blog platform”: just like Tumblr, it allows you to easily post and share your post amongst other users. The niche Posterous fills is that it automates sharing your content amongst other social media services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and… Twitter.

Unlike Twitpic, Posterous is a blogging platform, so it allows me to customize the look and feel of “my” blog, but also allows me to use my own domain. So I thought: “How about using Posterous as an alternative for Twitpic?”…. And it works like a charm:

Here is how to configure Posterous for the same functionality as Twitpic:

1. Register as a new user. Give your Posterous blog a name like “alter_ego.posterous.com”, and (important!) register it with the email address you will be Emailing your pictures from.

2. Next, add an “autopost” service to which each Posterous blogpost will be published the moment it comes online. In my case, I configured my Twitter account as an autopost option:

3. Take a picture from your mobile, email it as an attachment to “post@posterous.com”.

The subject line will become your blogpost’s title:

Posterous will automatically tweet the post’s title with the URL (using the “post.ly” URL shortener):

With some CSS style customization and adding my domain on my Posterous blog, my end-result is this: “Shot from the Hip”, my own Twitpic-like Posterous blog…