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Tumblr vs. Posterous

March 5th, 2010 Posted in Web Design

So, after experimenting with two free services, Tumblr and Posterous, I’ve decided that I’m a Tumblr guy. I already have Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and Flickr accounts, as well as a WordPress blog, and everything is accessible from my Philadesigns personal site. So, why the hell would I even need a Tumblr?!

Well, the answer is: “I don’t.” But, at the same time, it’s nice to have a place that puts all 5 of those above mentioned social networking and content storage services in one continuous “lifestream”. A stream of life…a never ending posting delight, that is until you do eventually die and stop posting. But, that’s a whole different story, and there’s services for that as well. Yes, people acutally back up their tweets with services such as TweetBackup.com.

Posterous

Posterous is not a lifestream. It only allows you to post on Posterous. You can’t even import your blog to it. But what you can do is post to all of your favorite social media outlets via the @posterous email services. They have a boomarklet as well that allows you to easily comment on a web page, post it to your Posterous and external blog, and have it posted immediately. But they toss in loads of HTML break tags, extra divs, and it’s a formatting nightmare, especially when posting to an external blog.

The one thing about Posterous that I find absolutely ridiculous is that there’s no way to delete your account. I would love to delete my half-ass account, but how to do so is not documented on Posterous.com, it’s not in the account settings, and loads of people on forums are questioning the same thing.

Tumblr

Tumblr allows you to import up to 5 different RSS feeds into your stream of content. I currently have it set up to display my most recent:

  • Flickr photos
  • Delicious links
  • Tweets
  • Blog posts
  • YouTube videos

Other great features of Tumblr include:

  • iPhone App (free)
  • Loads of preset themes that can be customized
  • Ability to add more pages and have them instantly appear in the navigation
  • Beautiful and easy to use interface
  • Custom domain setup
  • Audio posts — just call the number and report the scene!
  • Oh, and if you don’t like Tumblr, you can actually delete the account

    3 Responses to “Tumblr vs. Posterous”

    yuko says:

    November 2nd, 2010 at 6:59 am

    I totally agree, Posterous is like an office furniture. Tumblr is sexy.
    (and I do have my 1/2a**ed posterous site I couldn’t terminate, trying to get out and can’t felt like I joined an organized crime by chance!)

    Thanks for a charming post.

    Doug Lerner says:

    March 14th, 2011 at 7:13 pm

    You say you can’t import your blog to Posterous, but that’s not correct. I imported by WordPress blog with 3 years content to Posterous. You can even import from Tumblr to Posterous, but not the other way around.

    doug

    GC says:

    May 30th, 2011 at 1:05 am

    For completeness’ sake, there have been quite a few changes with Posterous. For example, all the “other features” you mention are now available there too.

    I am trying to chose and leaning towards Posterous right now.

    And by the way, Posterous does indeed interface with all the services you mentioned, only slightly differently: it seems like Tumblr sucks all your content from all the services and presents it in one spot. Posterous does the opposite. You post in one spot (posterous) and automagically (and selectively!) post the other sites. One email, and you’ve updated all your social media sites. I like the lack of headache. Hope this helps.

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