Tumblr vs. Posterous: microblogging throwdown

February 22nd, 2009 • 17 comments
Tags: Blog, blogging, microblogging, Posterous, tumblr

I’ve been auditioning the two heavyweights in the greater-than-140-characters microblogging space for a bit over a week now. I can tell you right off the bat, there is no clear winner here. Both services certainly have a place. In fact, the services are not quite as similar as I first thought.

Registration is an easy win for Posterous. It is one of few services that do not require a registration form to begin. Instead, just e-mail post [at] posterous [dot] com. Tumblr’s registration isn’t terrible, but you can’t beat no registration.

It was easily apparent that Tumblr (read my post about it) is the more full-featured of the two. It is truly just a half-step below a full-featured blog. There are multiple media types that can be easily added to your tumblelog. Posterous (read my post on that one too) takes a more hands-off approach to media. If you make a post with a link to a video on YouTube or a host of other media hosting sites, the media will automatically be embedded, but no attempt is made to facilitate your actually adding a video or audio file yourself unless you have first uploaded it to one of the aforementioned services. Tumblr, on the other hand, will send you to Vimeo when you want to post a video then add it to your blog. Audio hosting appears to be done in-house at Tumblr.

Both services offer a bookmarklet for easily sharing content without interrupting your surfing. There was at least one page that would not share with the Tumblr bookmarklet for some reason. I never really understood why that was. It seemed to share fine with Posterous. The bookmarklets are slightly different: Tumblr’s opens a new window/tab where Posterous overlays on top of the current page. I didn’t really see that make much difference. I’m sure some people would prefer one or the other, but it is purely cosmetic.

Both services also offer posting via e-mail. Posterous is intelligent in handling your e-mails. As I stated before, it will automatically embed media if you send e-mail with a link to said media. It seems Tumblr posts any link you send as just a link which is a bit of a bummer. You can, of course, still post a video through the web interface, but it would be nice to see e-mail posts handled based on context. Also, the Posterous address is a no-brainer: post [at] posterous [dot] com. Tumblr generates an e-mail address for each user. This means, you will probably not be recalling your e-mail for Tumblr if you happen to be away from your contact list.

The web interface is not the focus of the Posterous service. They really expect you to post everything via e-mail. It is still serviceable though. You get a WYSIWYG text editor, and, just like sending an e-mail, it will intelligently decide how to handle links. Even though Posterous doesn’t show you dedicated options for posting media, that functionality is present and works beautifully and simply. At Tumblr, you will select a type of post which will determine how your data is displayed. It has all the goodies as well. It’s nice to be able to explicitly specify what you are trying to post. If you were to post a link to a video site Posterous does not support, it is unclear how that would be handled. Since you would have already specified in Tumblr that you intend to post video, it makes sense that you would receive an error if Tumblr cannot find video at the given location.

If you need customization, you should really just forget about Posterous as there isn’t any to speak of. Tumblr has a really wide-range of options here. If this is going to be your only blog and you want to express yourself, Tumblr is the way to go.

Tumblr has added a new feature since I wrote about them that is very interesting. Users can now call a 1-800 number to post audio from their phones on the go. This is really cool, but I’m not sure exactly how I would use it.

As I said in the opening, neither service dominates the other. My advice: if this is your only blog or you really need to be able to customize, go with Tumblr. It’s easy, offers a lot of features, and completely flexible as far as styling. If you’re looking for a service to supplement other services in the social media space, stick to Posterous. It’s quick to setup, you don’t even have to think about design or customization, and you can basically use e-mail for all your posting be it text or multimedia. I’m personally going with Posterous. I’m already well-represented on the social web so I don’t need a microblogging service to reflect myself in any aspect other than the content. Posterous really dispenses with all the frills and lets me focus on just that.

Once again I want to mention that, should you decide to start using one of these services, you should totally add me. We could be friends and stuff. I will probably use my Posterous for most things, but I’m keeping my tumblelog around just to see if I can find a use for the über-cool audio posting via phone feature. If you’d prefer to follow both via RSS, I made a pipe for that which will try to eliminate any duplicate posts.  See you on the Interwebs!