8 ms·

Posterous takes on Tumblr

92 points by radicaldreamer 16y ago

cmelbye 16y ago
They're not going to get many new blogs from this. People use Tumblr because of the community, and most users spend a lot of time reblogging content from other blogs that they like. Posterous doesn't offer that. This may be good for people actually using Tumblr as a traditional blog, but those people are in the minority.
- narni0 16y ago
  This is actually the most relevant argument. I don't think any self respecting Tumblr user would contend that they speak in a vaccuum. The dashboard is central to the UI, and it's for this reason that they probably have yet to release a full API or even an RSS publicly.
Qz 16y ago
Oh god, feature-checklist-itis. I don't think that post is going to convert anyone who didn't want to convert already. Lack of comments on tumblr is a feature*. Like, how is 'ability to moderate them' also a feature? More like a hellish burden given down by a cruel god from on high.
- alttab 16y ago
  I have a wordpress blog that I abandoned because one post was popular and now my comments get spammed to death. I'd much rather have comments on my blog posts where they were syndicated - twitter, hacker news, reddit, etc. This keeps each set of responses within the context of the community the traffic came from as well as prevents blog-post footers turning into "first" and shouting matches.
  - pavs 16y ago
    Removing comments from blog is one mouse click away on wordpress. You can even permanently remove comments from your theme by removing just one line of code. Edit: Self-plug My new blog http://blogriot.com/ http://blogriot.com/. No comments, no sidebars, no distraction. Just me and my writing. Well, not much writing just set it up few days ago. I had the domain unused for few years so I thought, what the hey! why not use it?
Lewisham 16y ago
Good for them for encouraging the competition to step up. I'm not a user of either service, but heating up the game is good for everyone in the end.
pclark 16y ago
This is a really low blow. This is what companies do when they are clutching at straws - they spread misinformation. Considering: * Most tumblr themes have Disqus integration, and the "tumblr way" to comment is via reblog. * Multiple people can contribute to Tumblr blogs, I can also submit posts even if I'm not a user, and ask the authors questions (formspring style) * I can also password protect my Tumblr. They also missed the giant Tumblr plus - the community. Also, given that Posterous bootstrapped their themes from the Tumblr theme community stabbing Tumblr in the back is hardly cool. To clarify, I mean this: http://www.nbrightside.com/blog/2009/09/18/posterous-leveraging-tumblr-themes/ http://www.nbrightside.com/blog/2009/09/18/posterous-leverag... For a company as cool as Posterous I have no idea why they're resorting to such shammy PR.
- gaiusparx 16y ago
  Posterous tweeted 2 days ago "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying platforms: One new importer per day for the next 15 days". So Tumblr is a 'dying platform' after Ning huh? Which site is next? Is Wordpress another 'dying platform'? So does Posterous consider Facebook a 'dying platform' and come out an importer for Facebook?
  - chanux 16y ago
    Maybe they should implement an 'import posterous to posterous' tool if they continue this way.
    - seancron 16y ago
      To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. :)
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  Your opinions about comments aren't informed if you think people moderate them only out of fear of feedback. That we're having this discussion here proves that issue doesn't matter.
dotcoma 16y ago
Free service number 1 with no business model in sight wages war against free service number 2 with equally no business model in sight. "web2.0" is the new "New Economy".
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- pclark 16y ago
  Tumblr and Posterous have revenue. Tumblr sell themes and micropayment sponsorship, Posterous offer premium blogs to companies.
- dustydean 16y ago
  Spot on. I can't recommend people post their longer form content and media on platforms that have an opaque path to generating revenue. I do recommend that they have someone create a self-hosted open source platform for sharing their content online. The custom post types that have finally arrived in WordPress 3.0 allow people to create their own mini-Tumblrs on their self-hosted website. I feel that if someone works hard enough to create their own content then they should give some serious thought to their publishing platform too.
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    You could be cute and say that Marco has seen the writing on the wall with his Mac-only backup client (http://www.marco.org/277762675 http://www.marco.org/277762675). :) I belong in the group of people who have yet to be convinced of the financial stability of Tumblr, but its free hosting, great themes and ways to get exposure using the platform in combination with Fusion, Deck and other ads is very attractive; you would not risk any economical loss using Tumblr. To be fair to Tumblr, most of the people using the service don't seem to blog with writing content with staying value in mind; you could argue that the microblogging serves as a Zeitgeist echochamber similar to what Twitter can be in some instances.
- bentlegen 16y ago
  Tumblr does have a business model, or at least the start of one: http://www.tumblr.com/themes/premium http://www.tumblr.com/themes/premium
robryan 16y ago
Even if hey don't convert a lot from Tumbler I'm sure as a whole all the converters will be very successful. It's a sign that they are really confident in their product now that they are aggressively push for people on other platforms to check them out. You may only get one shot at getting people to consider your product that are already on other platforms.
buster 16y ago
no import from picasa, google reader, last.fm, rss means no tumblr/posterous for me :F I find soup.io just the perfect tool for me, btw ;)
- jeffgreco 16y ago
  Tumblr can import all these things, any RSS feed you throw at it.
  - buster 16y ago
    Is there some overview somewhere what automatic imports tumblr supports? Didn't find it on the page.
    - madh 16y ago
      Go to 'Customize' for your tumblr site and click 'Services.' At the bottom is 'Automatically import my...'. Choices include Delicious, YouTube, Vimeo, etc and RSS. Support is definitely lacking though and documentation is virtually non-existant.
      - buster 16y ago
        I see, thanks. It's a shame that they don't advertise those features better. It's a major point why i use soup.io.
        madh 16y ago
        Definitely. I even emailed support about it and the response was 'This is not supported' -- like they had never heard of it. Go figure.
- metachris 16y ago
  thumbs up for http://soup.io http://soup.io
far33d 16y ago
I absolutely LOVE this whole campaign (one service a day with auto-switching imports). It's good, creative PR and will probably get them as many new users as it converts from other services. [edit: one service a day, not week]
- jackowayed 16y ago
  It's one per day, btw.
- dman 16y ago
  On the other hand, when they really have something meaningful to say I will have gotten long past the point where I click on posterous stories on hn. imo the interestingness quotient on posterous stories has been running pretty low off late.
pclark 16y ago
Maybe they should add "Adds hidden affiliate codes to your links. Posterous: YES. Tumblr: NO." (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/posterous-starts-automatically-inserting-affiliate-links-into-sites-forgets-to-tell-users/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/posterous-starts-automatica...)
- ALee 16y ago
  Do you KNOW that Tumblr doesn't do this? Dig a little and I think you'll be surprised how many other services (including Tumblr) do this too...
  - pclark 16y ago
    Tumblr absolutely does not do this.
  - ALee 16y ago
    Oops, so sorry to Tumblr. This was a reckless comment and I'm in the wrong here. I misheard from a good friend that Tumblr does do this, he was actually referring to a number of services. Just received an email from Tumblr explicitly saying they don't. If I could delete the comment I would (but HN doesn't allow that), but I'll let this stand as my mistake and I'll back out from the Eastside-Westside tech battle.
- xelipe 16y ago
  Does Posterous have a reblog, favorite, follow, follower stream features? It seems that Posterous is trying to emulate some of the marketing mojo from Apple's switch ad campaign. This aggressive switch campaign might indicate that the number of new users to the system might have plateaued. Does Posterous post the active users, monthly impressions, etc?
- bentlegen 16y ago
  Did Posterous stop inserting affiliate links? And if not, did they end up officially informing their users?
- nedwin 16y ago
daveschappell 16y ago
Yeah, it's a stretch/sketchy campaign, but at least they're taking the gloves off, right? I personally am frustrated by the quirky Tumblr features (after many tries, I still don't get the formatting of reblogging) and miss plain on comments (when they don't have Disqus installed). Will be interesting to see which of the easy-blog-tools wins out. Right now, my bet would be on Tumblr.
- thingie 16y ago
  I don't know, personally, I'm frustrated by Posterous too. They're adding one useless features after another, but that email posting still cannot get even such a basic thing as paragraphs right. Just piles of br's after each line. And they are converting every nonascii character to HTML escape sequences. So after each post, I have to edit unreadable crap full of HTML escapes to put there at least that paragraphs (because otherwise, with larger font sizes, there'd be line break because of whole text-field width and then, after just a word or two, because of those hard breaks in HTML). On the benefit side, there are things like TypeKit, which seems quite useless to me, as I couldn't find any way to explicitly display only fonts that have Czech diacritics characters, which is essential to me. Facebook like buttons that I don't want… And so on. It's quite tiresome. At first, I liked Posterous because it was easy to setup and worked really well, but I'm getting quite weary of all those, seemingly unimportant, deficiencies.
  - rantfoil 16y ago
    I hear you on the email cleanup thing. We've put some measures in place to clean up markup, but there's much more to do here. If you have more feedback, I'd love to hear it -- my email is garry@posterous.com We're a work in progress like any other. But we're iterating as fast as we can.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
bonaldi 16y ago
Missing entry on the feature checklist: "World's tiniest fonts by default". Do the Posterous guys work in 800x600 or something?
joshbert 16y ago
I don't think this is the right focus for posterous. I really like their approach to blogging, but bad-mouthing other services can backfire in the long run.
- tsetse-fly 16y ago
  Yes, I rather dislike the tone of their post. If anything, these sorts of childish insults makes me want to avoid using Posterous.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  I think it's doing a fairly good job of hurting them in the shorter span of time, too.
KirinDave 16y ago
I love these checklist format comparisons that they do. It's an easy signal for me, “These people do not understand why one product is chosen over another.” If these are the dimensions by which you think Tumblr can be beaten, I wish you good luck but do not have high hopes for you. It's sort of like when someone uses the word “skinning” in reference to UX. I just immediately know to disregard everything they say as a total waste of time.
- benatkin 16y ago
  I agree. I also wonder who this blog post is written to. On the surface, it seems like it's written to tumblr users, to introduce them to posterous, but I don't think they'd assume that the best way to get tumblr users to switch is to insult them. (Unlike a car owner to whom a car dealer says something like, "Tired of driving that old clunker? Need a new car?", people are not limited by their budget when choosing a free blogging tool.)
ivankirigin 16y ago
Nice move. But the community and dashboard are what make tumblr good. I use both actively. They should make it easy to import my entire dashboard. They could also turn the Posterous dashboard into an rss reader. That would be incredibly useful. Reblooging is better than comment moderation administrivia.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
apgwoz 16y ago
All you need is a URL and an email address? So, I can automatically import any tumblr blog, even if I don't own it? That's a bit scary.
- twoism 16y ago
  That is actually how the Tumblr API works. You don't even need the email address.
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    Interesting. Throw /api/read at the end of a tumblr blog and you're set. Interesting approach, I guess.
- tsetse-fly 16y ago
  You must be terrified by copy/paste.
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    I think this is quite a bit different than copy/paste, but appreciate the humor in your comment. But, what's http://marco.org http://marco.org going to say when there are 20 clones of his blog all being indexed by google? It's sort of a kick in the teeth I'd say. EDIT: I didn't realize tumblr made it so friggin easy to copy an entire blog. My bad.
starkfist 16y ago
I moved from posterous to tumblr because the administrative control panel UI/UX was so bad. The default posterous skin is hideous. Tumblr is much easier to use and looks better out of the box. I couldn't care less about the features in the checklist.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Posts like this remind me to give thanks that I'm technically proficient enough not to have to depend on third party services for a communications platform.
ALee 16y ago
This is good for the market and the internet as a whole. Competition creates better products and innovation, which means my mother will eventually get to the world of easy posting of content. End of story.
deleted 16y ago
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- deleted 16y ago
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tbeseda 16y ago
Too bad the import from tumblr feature doesn't work...
jasongullickson 16y ago
The timing of this is unfortunate. I imagine that there is a way to prevent the "post via email" hack demonstrated last week but I haven't seen an official response from Posterous (they could send me an email?) which says to me that they don't take the threat seriously. I enjoyed having Posterous feed my entire online presence (twitter, facebook, etc.) but I turned this all off in the wake of the exploit. I'm sure there is a way to "fix" this, but I don't have time to try and figure it out myself; so it's easier to just turn it off until Posterous has time to tell me how to do it. Now we have this marketing campaign and a "we're the greatest" and "we can do everything" attitude; it feels very "going Facebook" to me... I think it's time to go find "the next".
- rantfoil 16y ago
  Here's the official response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443143 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443143 The exploit only involved a limited set of users and was fixed within hours of discovery.
  - jasongullickson 16y ago
    I guess that's kind of my point, I mean, shouldn't this information been posted somewhere more obvious (the official posterous blog perhaps?) or even better, as an email to registered users?
yan 16y ago
Boiling tumblr to a set of bullet points /entirely/ misses the point.
jonpaul 16y ago
I'm a happy Tumblr user. What does Posterous offer that Tumbler doesn't?
- georgieporgie 16y ago
  Well, dickishness, apparently.
d0m 16y ago
I have no posterous neither Tumblr account, but only because of that post, I'll give a try to tumblr.
biznickman 16y ago
One reason this won't work: Tumblr users don't read the Posterous blog ... Perhaps they can set up a tumblr account and promote it there? That would be true guerilla style.
mtrichardson 16y ago
My main problem with Posterous imports is that they don't preserve the URLs of my previous posts. I have custom domains set up, so redirects are broken. I was hoping that with the latest Tumblr import they had fixed it, but no go.
zachwaugh 16y ago
The only advantage Posterous has is built-in comments. Yes, you can use Disqus on Tumblr, but it's a bit of hack, and Disqus has it's own issues. Regardless of your opinion about comments, it should at least be an option for a blog. But here is where Tumblr wins, you can't include any JavaScript in your Posterous theme (http://posterous.com/theming/porting http://posterous.com/theming/porting). So if they don't support a feature you want (like comments or TypeKit), you can't add it on your own like you can with Tumblr.
jonathanmarcus 16y ago
Aggressive marketing would be a woefully insufficient characterization. As both an entrepreneur and target user, this crosses my personal moral standard. Having said that, its definitely clever and very well written! I will stick with my high school friends on Tumblr though. And so will all of the HiiDef blogs. Tumblr has always been really good to me.
johnl 16y ago
I wonder what Posterous's arguments were for going for the direct attack route instead of an offer to purchase or merge? You can get bigger quicker by purchasing competitors than by swiping their clients I would think.
photomatt 16y ago
I like the Posterous guys and have sent a number of users to their service before we (WordPress.com) had our own email feature. I hope when they launch the WordPress one it's nicer in tone. I've been very impressed that even though Tumblr is growing aggressively they've consistently taken the high road,
fookyong 16y ago
Feature wars are so trite.

They're not going to get many new blogs from this. People use Tumblr because of the community, and most users spend a lot of time reblogging content from other blogs that they like. Posterous doesn't offer that. This may be good for people actually using Tumblr as a traditional blog, but those people are in the minority.

narni0 16y ago
This is actually the most relevant argument. I don't think any self respecting Tumblr user would contend that they speak in a vaccuum. The dashboard is central to the UI, and it's for this reason that they probably have yet to release a full API or even an RSS publicly.

Qz 16y ago

Oh god, feature-checklist-itis. I don't think that post is going to convert anyone who didn't want to convert already. Lack of comments on tumblr is a feature*. Like, how is 'ability to moderate them' also a feature? More like a hellish burden given down by a cruel god from on high.

alttab 16y ago
I have a wordpress blog that I abandoned because one post was popular and now my comments get spammed to death. I'd much rather have comments on my blog posts where they were syndicated - twitter, hacker news, reddit, etc. This keeps each set of responses within the context of the community the traffic came from as well as prevents blog-post footers turning into "first" and shouting matches.
- pavs 16y ago
  Removing comments from blog is one mouse click away on wordpress. You can even permanently remove comments from your theme by removing just one line of code. Edit: Self-plug My new blog http://blogriot.com/ http://blogriot.com/. No comments, no sidebars, no distraction. Just me and my writing. Well, not much writing just set it up few days ago. I had the domain unused for few years so I thought, what the hey! why not use it?

Lewisham 16y ago

Good for them for encouraging the competition to step up. I'm not a user of either service, but heating up the game is good for everyone in the end.

pclark 16y ago

This is a really low blow. This is what companies do when they are clutching at straws - they spread misinformation. Considering: * Most tumblr themes have Disqus integration, and the "tumblr way" to comment is via reblog. * Multiple people can contribute to Tumblr blogs, I can also submit posts even if I'm not a user, and ask the authors questions (formspring style) * I can also password protect my Tumblr. They also missed the giant Tumblr plus - the community. Also, given that Posterous bootstrapped their themes from the Tumblr theme community stabbing Tumblr in the back is hardly cool. To clarify, I mean this: http://www.nbrightside.com/blog/2009/09/18/posterous-leveraging-tumblr-themes/ http://www.nbrightside.com/blog/2009/09/18/posterous-leverag... For a company as cool as Posterous I have no idea why they're resorting to such shammy PR.

gaiusparx 16y ago
Posterous tweeted 2 days ago "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying platforms: One new importer per day for the next 15 days". So Tumblr is a 'dying platform' after Ning huh? Which site is next? Is Wordpress another 'dying platform'? So does Posterous consider Facebook a 'dying platform' and come out an importer for Facebook?
- chanux 16y ago
  Maybe they should implement an 'import posterous to posterous' tool if they continue this way.
  - seancron 16y ago
    To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. :)
ivankirigin 16y ago
Your opinions about comments aren't informed if you think people moderate them only out of fear of feedback. That we're having this discussion here proves that issue doesn't matter.

dotcoma 16y ago

Free service number 1 with no business model in sight wages war against free service number 2 with equally no business model in sight. "web2.0" is the new "New Economy".

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pclark 16y ago
Tumblr and Posterous have revenue. Tumblr sell themes and micropayment sponsorship, Posterous offer premium blogs to companies.
dustydean 16y ago
Spot on. I can't recommend people post their longer form content and media on platforms that have an opaque path to generating revenue. I do recommend that they have someone create a self-hosted open source platform for sharing their content online. The custom post types that have finally arrived in WordPress 3.0 allow people to create their own mini-Tumblrs on their self-hosted website. I feel that if someone works hard enough to create their own content then they should give some serious thought to their publishing platform too.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  You could be cute and say that Marco has seen the writing on the wall with his Mac-only backup client (http://www.marco.org/277762675 http://www.marco.org/277762675). :) I belong in the group of people who have yet to be convinced of the financial stability of Tumblr, but its free hosting, great themes and ways to get exposure using the platform in combination with Fusion, Deck and other ads is very attractive; you would not risk any economical loss using Tumblr. To be fair to Tumblr, most of the people using the service don't seem to blog with writing content with staying value in mind; you could argue that the microblogging serves as a Zeitgeist echochamber similar to what Twitter can be in some instances.
bentlegen 16y ago
Tumblr does have a business model, or at least the start of one: http://www.tumblr.com/themes/premium http://www.tumblr.com/themes/premium

robryan 16y ago

Even if hey don't convert a lot from Tumbler I'm sure as a whole all the converters will be very successful. It's a sign that they are really confident in their product now that they are aggressively push for people on other platforms to check them out. You may only get one shot at getting people to consider your product that are already on other platforms.

buster 16y ago

no import from picasa, google reader, last.fm, rss means no tumblr/posterous for me :F I find soup.io just the perfect tool for me, btw ;)

jeffgreco 16y ago
Tumblr can import all these things, any RSS feed you throw at it.
- buster 16y ago
  Is there some overview somewhere what automatic imports tumblr supports? Didn't find it on the page.
  - madh 16y ago
    Go to 'Customize' for your tumblr site and click 'Services.' At the bottom is 'Automatically import my...'. Choices include Delicious, YouTube, Vimeo, etc and RSS. Support is definitely lacking though and documentation is virtually non-existant.
    - buster 16y ago
      I see, thanks. It's a shame that they don't advertise those features better. It's a major point why i use soup.io.
      - madh 16y ago
        Definitely. I even emailed support about it and the response was 'This is not supported' -- like they had never heard of it. Go figure.
metachris 16y ago
thumbs up for http://soup.io http://soup.io

far33d 16y ago

I absolutely LOVE this whole campaign (one service a day with auto-switching imports). It's good, creative PR and will probably get them as many new users as it converts from other services. [edit: one service a day, not week]

jackowayed 16y ago
It's one per day, btw.
dman 16y ago
On the other hand, when they really have something meaningful to say I will have gotten long past the point where I click on posterous stories on hn. imo the interestingness quotient on posterous stories has been running pretty low off late.

pclark 16y ago

Maybe they should add "Adds hidden affiliate codes to your links. Posterous: YES. Tumblr: NO." (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/posterous-starts-automatically-inserting-affiliate-links-into-sites-forgets-to-tell-users/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/posterous-starts-automatica...)

ALee 16y ago
Do you KNOW that Tumblr doesn't do this? Dig a little and I think you'll be surprised how many other services (including Tumblr) do this too...
- pclark 16y ago
  Tumblr absolutely does not do this.
- ALee 16y ago
  Oops, so sorry to Tumblr. This was a reckless comment and I'm in the wrong here. I misheard from a good friend that Tumblr does do this, he was actually referring to a number of services. Just received an email from Tumblr explicitly saying they don't. If I could delete the comment I would (but HN doesn't allow that), but I'll let this stand as my mistake and I'll back out from the Eastside-Westside tech battle.
xelipe 16y ago
Does Posterous have a reblog, favorite, follow, follower stream features? It seems that Posterous is trying to emulate some of the marketing mojo from Apple's switch ad campaign. This aggressive switch campaign might indicate that the number of new users to the system might have plateaued. Does Posterous post the active users, monthly impressions, etc?
bentlegen 16y ago
Did Posterous stop inserting affiliate links? And if not, did they end up officially informing their users?
nedwin 16y ago

daveschappell 16y ago

Yeah, it's a stretch/sketchy campaign, but at least they're taking the gloves off, right? I personally am frustrated by the quirky Tumblr features (after many tries, I still don't get the formatting of reblogging) and miss plain on comments (when they don't have Disqus installed). Will be interesting to see which of the easy-blog-tools wins out. Right now, my bet would be on Tumblr.

thingie 16y ago
I don't know, personally, I'm frustrated by Posterous too. They're adding one useless features after another, but that email posting still cannot get even such a basic thing as paragraphs right. Just piles of br's after each line. And they are converting every nonascii character to HTML escape sequences. So after each post, I have to edit unreadable crap full of HTML escapes to put there at least that paragraphs (because otherwise, with larger font sizes, there'd be line break because of whole text-field width and then, after just a word or two, because of those hard breaks in HTML). On the benefit side, there are things like TypeKit, which seems quite useless to me, as I couldn't find any way to explicitly display only fonts that have Czech diacritics characters, which is essential to me. Facebook like buttons that I don't want… And so on. It's quite tiresome. At first, I liked Posterous because it was easy to setup and worked really well, but I'm getting quite weary of all those, seemingly unimportant, deficiencies.
- rantfoil 16y ago
  I hear you on the email cleanup thing. We've put some measures in place to clean up markup, but there's much more to do here. If you have more feedback, I'd love to hear it -- my email is garry@posterous.com We're a work in progress like any other. But we're iterating as fast as we can.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

bonaldi 16y ago

Missing entry on the feature checklist: "World's tiniest fonts by default". Do the Posterous guys work in 800x600 or something?

joshbert 16y ago

I don't think this is the right focus for posterous. I really like their approach to blogging, but bad-mouthing other services can backfire in the long run.

tsetse-fly 16y ago
Yes, I rather dislike the tone of their post. If anything, these sorts of childish insults makes me want to avoid using Posterous.
kmfrk 16y ago
I think it's doing a fairly good job of hurting them in the shorter span of time, too.

KirinDave 16y ago

I love these checklist format comparisons that they do. It's an easy signal for me, “These people do not understand why one product is chosen over another.” If these are the dimensions by which you think Tumblr can be beaten, I wish you good luck but do not have high hopes for you. It's sort of like when someone uses the word “skinning” in reference to UX. I just immediately know to disregard everything they say as a total waste of time.

benatkin 16y ago
I agree. I also wonder who this blog post is written to. On the surface, it seems like it's written to tumblr users, to introduce them to posterous, but I don't think they'd assume that the best way to get tumblr users to switch is to insult them. (Unlike a car owner to whom a car dealer says something like, "Tired of driving that old clunker? Need a new car?", people are not limited by their budget when choosing a free blogging tool.)

ivankirigin 16y ago

Nice move. But the community and dashboard are what make tumblr good. I use both actively. They should make it easy to import my entire dashboard. They could also turn the Posterous dashboard into an rss reader. That would be incredibly useful. Reblooging is better than comment moderation administrivia.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

apgwoz 16y ago

All you need is a URL and an email address? So, I can automatically import any tumblr blog, even if I don't own it? That's a bit scary.

twoism 16y ago
That is actually how the Tumblr API works. You don't even need the email address.
- apgwoz 16y ago
  Interesting. Throw /api/read at the end of a tumblr blog and you're set. Interesting approach, I guess.
tsetse-fly 16y ago
You must be terrified by copy/paste.
- apgwoz 16y ago
  I think this is quite a bit different than copy/paste, but appreciate the humor in your comment. But, what's http://marco.org http://marco.org going to say when there are 20 clones of his blog all being indexed by google? It's sort of a kick in the teeth I'd say. EDIT: I didn't realize tumblr made it so friggin easy to copy an entire blog. My bad.

starkfist 16y ago

I moved from posterous to tumblr because the administrative control panel UI/UX was so bad. The default posterous skin is hideous. Tumblr is much easier to use and looks better out of the box. I couldn't care less about the features in the checklist.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

Posts like this remind me to give thanks that I'm technically proficient enough not to have to depend on third party services for a communications platform.

ALee 16y ago

This is good for the market and the internet as a whole. Competition creates better products and innovation, which means my mother will eventually get to the world of easy posting of content. End of story.

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tbeseda 16y ago

Too bad the import from tumblr feature doesn't work...

jasongullickson 16y ago

The timing of this is unfortunate. I imagine that there is a way to prevent the "post via email" hack demonstrated last week but I haven't seen an official response from Posterous (they could send me an email?) which says to me that they don't take the threat seriously. I enjoyed having Posterous feed my entire online presence (twitter, facebook, etc.) but I turned this all off in the wake of the exploit. I'm sure there is a way to "fix" this, but I don't have time to try and figure it out myself; so it's easier to just turn it off until Posterous has time to tell me how to do it. Now we have this marketing campaign and a "we're the greatest" and "we can do everything" attitude; it feels very "going Facebook" to me... I think it's time to go find "the next".

rantfoil 16y ago
Here's the official response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443143 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443143 The exploit only involved a limited set of users and was fixed within hours of discovery.
- jasongullickson 16y ago
  I guess that's kind of my point, I mean, shouldn't this information been posted somewhere more obvious (the official posterous blog perhaps?) or even better, as an email to registered users?

yan 16y ago

Boiling tumblr to a set of bullet points /entirely/ misses the point.

jonpaul 16y ago

I'm a happy Tumblr user. What does Posterous offer that Tumbler doesn't?

georgieporgie 16y ago
Well, dickishness, apparently.

d0m 16y ago

I have no posterous neither Tumblr account, but only because of that post, I'll give a try to tumblr.

biznickman 16y ago

One reason this won't work: Tumblr users don't read the Posterous blog ... Perhaps they can set up a tumblr account and promote it there? That would be true guerilla style.

mtrichardson 16y ago

My main problem with Posterous imports is that they don't preserve the URLs of my previous posts. I have custom domains set up, so redirects are broken. I was hoping that with the latest Tumblr import they had fixed it, but no go.

zachwaugh 16y ago

The only advantage Posterous has is built-in comments. Yes, you can use Disqus on Tumblr, but it's a bit of hack, and Disqus has it's own issues. Regardless of your opinion about comments, it should at least be an option for a blog. But here is where Tumblr wins, you can't include any JavaScript in your Posterous theme (http://posterous.com/theming/porting http://posterous.com/theming/porting). So if they don't support a feature you want (like comments or TypeKit), you can't add it on your own like you can with Tumblr.

jonathanmarcus 16y ago

Aggressive marketing would be a woefully insufficient characterization. As both an entrepreneur and target user, this crosses my personal moral standard. Having said that, its definitely clever and very well written! I will stick with my high school friends on Tumblr though. And so will all of the HiiDef blogs. Tumblr has always been really good to me.

johnl 16y ago

I wonder what Posterous's arguments were for going for the direct attack route instead of an offer to purchase or merge? You can get bigger quicker by purchasing competitors than by swiping their clients I would think.

photomatt 16y ago

I like the Posterous guys and have sent a number of users to their service before we (WordPress.com) had our own email feature. I hope when they launch the WordPress one it's nicer in tone. I've been very impressed that even though Tumblr is growing aggressively they've consistently taken the high road,

fookyong 16y ago

Feature wars are so trite.