Posterous goes after Tumblr

We're on TumblrI am a dedicated user of both Tumblr and Posterous. I think that they are wonderful at what they do and they bring me a lot of readers. I think that the benefits of both are about equal, but, right now at least, Tumblr has the bigger audience.

That being said, Posterous is trying to up its game:

Direct attacks and unprovoked hostility are usually reserved for gossip blogs, not the people who make the platforms that power them.

But Posterous, the blog service that lets users post using e-mail, did just that Tuesday, taking a shot at a platform called Tumblr on its company blog. The headline: "Hey Tumblr users: Want comments? Need privacy? Graduate to Posterous."

"Blogging on Tumblr is sort of like being in high school," the statement reads. "But you know deep-down that you can't be in high school forever. Eventually, you have to move on."

Posterous (pronounced either post-er-us or paw-ster-us, you choose) goes on to make some contentions about its superiority that are subjective, at best, and inaccurate, at worst. Contrary to those claims, Tumblr actually has a "real commenting system," though it does require some tinkering with settings to enable. Also, Tumblr has a feature for posting by e-mail.

"The claims they make about Tumblr are obviously false," Tumblr founder David Karp wrote in an e-mail. "I hope they decide to make this right."

I don't worry so much about the claims--I worry about the quality of the service. I want to direct the readers who browse those sites to my site and increase the value of what I do. I don't mind mixing it up and reaching out to people who look at those sites--it's exposure that you normally wouldn't get by simply posting things in one place, hoping a search engine picks you up. I would rather be proactive and making things in other places than resting in one place, hoping people stumble across what I'm doing. 

Can you be penalized for being proactive? Sure, but that has yet to happen. I see these sites as increasing the value of the pieces of content I am pushing out (a fraction of my content is reblogged onto other platforms).

Anyway, I like what they do and I like what Zemanta does as well. Twitter? What's that? I haven't messed with Twitter in months. Twitter is such a technical mess right now that, when I went to the site and tried to find my own account, I ran into a time-out message because the platform is, once again, overwhelmed and burping up fail whale. It's dead to me.

Posted via email from An American Lion is on Posterous