Well, I finally moved one of my Tumblr blogs over here to Posterous. Here’s why:
1. Less really is more. Sure, Tumblr has more themes. But have you ever tried to go through them all to pick one? It takes forever. And then you try another one. And then you can’t remember where you found the first one. Before you know it, three hours have gone by. Posterous has about 10 themes. Sometimes, it’s better not to have too much choice. (But I have to say that the Tumblr theme that I finally found sure is pretty…)
2. Tags are Zen. It really bothers me how I can’t find my tags easily on my Tumblr log. (And, yes, I have tried about 10,000 themes, they’re all the same.) I’m a tag person. I love tags. Tags make me happy. But most of the Tumblr themes have the tags hidden in the archive views and it takes me 10,000 clicks to get there. My Posterous blogs have my tags on the home page, right where I need to see them. Zen.
3. Control over my auto-posting. With Posterous, I can get very specific about auto-posting. Some stories I want to post to both Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes it just a Twitter story. Sometimes it’s a family-and-friends story that goes only to Facebook. When I added Flickr for my photo stories, I got even happier. I love that I can control my auto-posting (although it did take me a while to figure out how to do it, and that I have the maximum control in the web view, as long as I remember to click on the Post Options before I post.) With Tumblr, it just everywhere all at once. So I had to disable Facebook. Yuk.
4. The title is the story in Twitter. I really didn’t like how Tumblr was auto-posting to Twitter: the title would show up, and then the rest of the story, which of course was more than 140 characters, so the tweet would end up looking incomplete. I put a lot of thought into my titles in my Posterous / Tumblr blogs: the title is the 140-chararcter story. There’s just a little bit more information in what comes after the story: a picture or two, maybe more details. But Tumblr was mashing them all together. No. Wrong.
Having said this, I did keep this Tumblr for collecting my little bits of scrapbooking inspiration all over the web. Although I can’t easily see my tags (grrr), I do enjoy how this gallery-type theme lets me see everything at a glance. Besides, other scrapbookers have found me and I’d hate to disappoint them by leaving…
My take on Posterous versus Tumblr is this: Posterous is great for telling stories, and for controlling to whom you want to tell these stories. I find Tumblr easier to collect bits of photo inspiration all over the internet.
But here’s the really ironic thing: I kept my old Tumblr blog because it’s just so darn pretty. Besides, I can auto-post from new Posterous blog to the old Tumblr blog.
Now that’s having your cake and eating it too…!
