Posterous VS Tumblr (?!)
Two microblogging platforms go head-to-head
IF LIFESTYLES CONTINUE TO BE MORE mobile, this is the future. Introducing Posterous, inarguably the simplest blogging platform on the web.
Just e-mail chunks of text, photos, videos, even music to post@posterous.com and stand back. Content is instantly posted on a website, also conveniently created by Posterous for you. All file extensions are accepted—even your headache-to-post videos are automatically converted for you. You can even export files you placed on Posterous, then auto-post them on Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, or Multiply. Remember Multiply?
It really is blogging sans the technicalities. You don’t even have to sign up for an account—your e-mail I.D. immediately becomes the name of your Posterous website. All pages are incredibly easy to maintain as they’re assigned a uniform look that’s simple, elegant and organized. Posterous even indexes better than Google!
If used properly, Posterous could be the common address of on-the-go life streams from around the globe.
Thumbs down to Tumblr!
Tumblr, a stripped-down Blogger or Wordpress, is an easy-to-use, attractive looking customizable microblogging platform—until it introduced “Tumblarity,” a metric that ranks users based on the number of “followers” one has, the number of posts one has made, the number of times one’s posts has been “liked,” and the number of times one has been “reblogged.”
The result? Instead of posting what’s really on their mind, users have been polluting the web with posts that they deem readers will “like” and “reblog.”
And you thought popularity contests ended in high school.
Young illustrators, photographers and designers used to flood Tumblr with their promising works. It was a joy to browse through pages and pages of raw talent. Sadly, what was once a wonderful (even hip) venue for creative expression has now turned into a wasteland of the ultra-annoying.
Exhibit A: Our country’s Tumblr community is ruled by a bunch of tweens who post either well-edited images starring their pretty faces or cornball quotes emblazoned on fuzzy photos lifted from Flickr.
“My tumblarity is sooooo low today. Huhuhu. *tear* LOL,” one of them posted last week. (LOL is webspeak for laughing out loud—so she’s crying AND laughing? Epic.)
Another particularly popular user has been dubbed (by herself?) as “Queen of Tumblr” and started a contest where readers competed in trying to prove who was her biggest fan. A barrage of readers sent in caricatures, letters of affection and other lame crap.
Queen of Tumblr’s prize for her biggest fan? A coffee shop’s 2010 planner, which begs the question: Who should we feel sorry for? Q.o.T. or her fans?) What was once an exercise in creative expression has now turned into a haven of vanity.
Even some Tumblr users aren’t amused. “This is dedicated to one of the worst ideas conceived in the history of social networking,” says the headline of TumblaritySucks.tumblr.com. “May it die a quick death.”
This week Tumblr indefinitely took out the Tumblarity feature, until the platform finishes overhauling the site’s dashboard. “It could come back in a different form,” one Tumblr user said.
Will the supposed end of Tumblarity bring back the good ol’ days of Tumblr? Stay tuned.
And yea, THAT’S ABSOLUTELY TRUE. SO BLOGGERS, OPEN UP YOUR MIND. THIS IS A BLOG SITE FOR GOODNESS SAKE! A MUST REBLOG.