Going private in 2011

If there was one Internet sensation in 2010 that touched on a bigger trend, it was the simple-yet-compelling offering of mobile photo sharing apps like Instagram. Because photos know no language barrier and smartphones have hit an inflection point, the timing was perfect. I love Instagram — using your phone to discover beautiful images from around the world is an unquestioned delight.

So why is it easier to share photos with random connections than to share them privately with family and friends?

The answer lies in the status quo. There are no good solutions to share with your different networks right now; group communication innovations stagnated as companies focused on the one-to-all sharing approach made popular by Twitter and Facebook. In fact sharing privately is positively broken – – the default option remains the same as it was 10 years ago: Multi-recipient, inbox-cluttering emails that are impossible to search and websites that weren’t built for sharing photos and videos. The early value of eGroups/Yahoo didn’t evolve fast enough with other innovations in social. And while other groups services have cropped up, they are too complicated to set-up, handle rich media poorly, ignore the mobile user or fall way short in the privacy department.

But now sharing privately to groups of friends and family is poised for a comeback. You don’t have to look further than recent initiatives by Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Facebook to see the renewed focus on private group sharing -– spurred on by group innovations bubbling up from sharing startups from Path to my company Posterous. This comeback is fueled by the realization that no one belongs to just one social network and that photo and video are inspiring people to share more and more often. Each of us belongs to many networks – my friends from Stanford, those who share my passion for cars, other entrepreneurs from incubator Y Combinator, and, of course, my extended family. We should have the ability to communicate separately with each of them.

Making group communications simple, mobile, and rich-media friendly will bring hordes of new groups, clubs, and families online — groups that aren’t served well by one-to-many platforms and their anemic Group side-dishes. Posterous aims to bring the same level of simplicity and common sense to private sharing, as it did to sites and blogs. Posterous Groups are essentially group email lists the way they should be, combining extensive privacy controls, email-to-post simplicity, auto-magic handling of rich media for frictionless sharing. In a photo-driven, mobile world the need for a new approach to Groups was clear.

A few weeks into the launch of Posterous Groups, we’re astounded by the pace of signups. Group communication reimagined will spark a wave of sharing.

Sachin Agarwal is cofounder and chief executive of simple blogging startup Posterous.