charmian:

troisroyaumes:

Mashable compares Posterous and Tumblr. Nothing new that you couldn’t figure out by looking at the features yourself. Personally, I’m torn: I feel attached to Tumblr now and do most of my blogging there, but I really love the convenience of posting by email.

Hmm, personally I’m like w/e about email, and I do actually prefer the Tumblr posting interface (how good to have the links to post something on the Dashboard), but there are other features on Posterous which do excite me. And, it seems they have some of the all important Popular Early Adopters (a social networking site is, as Tom Ewing pointed out, not like a car which you buy for its features/design/horsepower alone, but more like a town, where it’s not only the location/amenities which are important, but the people in the town and the local culture and whether you know people who live there or would like to know them.

Hey, they should integrate this into the regular Tumblr

The email thing makes me think Posterous is a tool I should investigate for work. But autoposting seems a bit of a menace to me: creates multi-platform clutter, and can fatally diffuse discussion around a post.

The Mashable piece does talk culture - in its community and early adopters sections - but is a bit stand-offish about Tumblr’s rich social features - reblogging in particular is a feature that seems genuinely on-side with how (we’re told) people use the web to share content. It’s also a bit disingenuous to contrast Tumblr’s smattering of celebrities with the tech A-List early adopter voting for Posterous: the Tumblr slebs don’t really set the tone - they don’t dominate the tumblarity lists in the way that celebs do on Twitter (say).

Tumblr instead seems to be led by a mix of hipsters and teenage/college-age kids - it’s a very visual, pop-cultural kind of place, rather than a tech or marketing or “social media” hangout. (There is surely nowhere else online where my little read-by-50-people blog would be in a Top 5 Marketing Blogs list!) I don’t think it’s outrageously cheeky to suggest that this crowd might make people like the Mashable guys, or Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel or Guy Kawasaki a little bit confused or uncomfortable. Far better to look at the next small pond your fellow A-List big fish are heading to! After all, early adopters aren’t the issue - it’s having the right kind of early adopters.

For the most part though the Mashable piece is fair: Posterous seems to have momentum on its side. My suspicion is that Tumblr will end up as the LiveJournal of its era - a place that breeds fierce cultural attachment and specialises in rich social features which connect and empower fans*, but overlooked and ultimately written off because of its lack of appeal to tech opinion formers.

*(though Tumblr specialises in curatorship where LJ encouraged creativity.)