Reviewing Posterous, kinda.
So a month ago I started out with a microblog on Tumblr. I really really have enjoyed Tumbling. I find that on my Wordpress blog, I always feel like I need to compose these awesomely written blog posts that have deep and meaningful thoughts on gaming. It’s kind of daunting to stare at the empty Wordpress text editor. Twitter is always fun for conversations and short little blasts of information – but Tumblr gave me a place to really say what I want to say, as short or long as I want, as often as I want, and as low-quality as I want. Nobody really reads it and it’s a nice little place where I can just be me. Sometimes I post cooking recipes, or pictures from my phone, or interesting links from the internet.
I’d heard of Posterous too, but I am just not sure exactly where it is going to fit in within my daily life. The good thing about Posterous is that everything is via email, and since I’m connected to email 100% of every day (thank you iPhone) it works out great for getting virtually anything to the internet whenever I want to. The benefits over Tumblr (that I’ve found so far) are:
Integration with other sites is better. The Posterous site can hook into my Flickr and auto-upload all images to there, it can autopost to my LiveJournal, or to a Wordpress blog, or even to my Tumblr! So, if I can do everything through Posterous and have it show up on Tumblr, that sounds like a done deal right?
You can set exactly where you want the content to go. Emailing flickr@posterous.com will send the images right to my flickr. Flickr+twitter@posterous.com will go to both. You can combine however you want and even add tags right within the email, which is awesome.
Easy ability for multiple people to contribute. Give them the email address – like post@metaplace.posterous.com and it would let our entire company autopost to the blog. They could even make it private for quick and easy image uploading. It’s pretty rad.
Good integration with Facebook and Twitter (doesn’t seem like it will be too annoying)
Comment system is built right in, no need to add Disqus like Tumblr requires you to.
No real need to ever go to the actual website. You can just do everything from your email or SMS – which is totally awesome. I like knowing that things are just going where they’re supposed to.
The only real reason to keep the Tumblr is because it looks fancy, has better themes, and has a bookmarklet for posting content (which Posterous says they’re getting soon). While I like the look of my Tumblr better, the formatting of the Posterous is more like a blog – it reads better. And I’ve never cared for the reblogging thing in Tumblr, it just seems so incestuous and not interesting. And while Tumblr has a much bigger marketbase right now, Posterous just got a hefty round of funding and seems to have a team that’s pretty passionate about the product. I’m going to try it out for a bit longer, and if I continue to be impressed, I’m switching over my tamibaribeau.com domain to the Posterous instead of the Tumblr – and then probably removing the tumblr altogether. Nice work Posterous!
The only real reason to keep the Tumblr is because it looks fancy, has better themes, and has a bookmarklet for posting content (which Posterous says they’re getting soon). While I like the look of my Tumblr better, the formatting of the Posterous is more like a blog – it reads better. And I’ve never cared for the reblogging thing in Tumblr, it just seems so incestuous and not interesting. And while Tumblr has a much bigger marketbase right now, Posterous just got a hefty round of funding and seems to have a team that’s pretty passionate about the product. I’m going to try it out for a bit longer, and if I continue to be impressed, I’m switching over my tamibaribeau.com domain to the Posterous instead of the Tumblr – and then probably removing the tumblr altogether. Nice work Posterous!
