Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous's ass

Yes! That's the point I gravitated towards as well, there really is a similar playful yet polished vibe from several New York startups like Vimeo, Boxee and Tumblr, off the top of my head.

As for the main point of the article - couldn't disagree more, from my personal use case. I'm a Bay Are startup geek but also a designer, so hopefully my biases cancel each other out. I like Tumblr's look but abandoned it after a few days because I didn't want to get sucked into their community features. I'm not a big fan of design subcultures like deviant art or livejournal, really the only online community I've been attracted to and stuck around for is HN. And it's a pet peeve of mine when sites or apps have only good import tools and not export, it's like they want to pretend the identity you've built up around the rest of the web doesn't exist. I'd rather see better integration with my existing networks elsewhere - that's where posterous' autoposting feature really impressed me. After starting up a posterous account as part of the ycombinator application process a few months ago, I gave it a try earlier this month for personal blogging and it's completely reinvigorated my site.

And I really disagree with his contention that posterous is only for geeks - the main feature set is pretty newbie-oriented. I can have my mom set up a blog in seconds via something she already understands - email - and have it autopost to her flickr and facebook accounts, which saves her the hassle of having to refer to her notebook on my instructions on how to upload and manage those services.

I chose Tumblr over Posterous because of the elegant templates and the art/music tastes, so I agree here. If Posterous compares itself to Gmail for blogging, then Tumblr is like a public Evernote for scrapbooking. I'm not using it to promote my own ideas or build my professional "brand". Posterous seems as though it's trying to cater both to the computer illiterate and the time-crunched techie/professional who lives and dies by email to organize life a la GTD. For example, Tumblr has a quotations format separate from the text post option, more useful to me than the Google analytics tool that Posterous offers.

The downside is that Tumblr does have a greater share of Livejournal/teen angst, but I've carved out my niche of grad students, graphic designers, and classical music aficionados who upload great performances. The fact that TED Chris and John Maeda (President of RISD) use Posterous is tempting, but also makes it more businesslike.

I have yet to understand why I would want to email posts other than videos, as it's not particularly onerous to use bookmarklets. And Posting within Tumblr means my tags autocomplete, whereas Posterous has you write tags in your email subject line. Posting videos to Posterous is easier though, as Tumblr requires videos first to be hosted on Vimeo. Posterous might have another advantage as it is more useful to coordinate updates to a multitude of other sites, including Tumblr. But I screen different content on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr, so I actually don't want the same things posting on all my sites.