A good review, other than the fact that the article incorrectly places Posterous in the same [manufactured] niche as Tumblr.

Posterous is just a blogging platform that lets you use existing technologies to author and publish posts (to various locations). I routinely publish hundreds of words to my Posterous blog, and nobody has reprimanded me thus far.

Yeah, i'm not happy when people think Posterous is microblogging or Tumbleblogging. There's no limit to what you can send us, and that's the beauty of email.

Oh well, people can use us however they want, compare us to whatever they see fit. When people say they use Tumblr, I ask them how they post 3 photos, and they are stumped :)

Hello, you work for Posterous? Good work so far, congrats. ;)

Could you please reveal a bit of your future plans, for example what will be in the paid version? ;-) Or at least, I'd be very grateful if you can tell whether you are planing to allow displaying ads in the future.

That's because users can't customize yet. So while we can write to our hearts content some of us use it as a microblog that complements are primary blog. I ditched WP a while back cuz Posterous was so easy to use. But now I miss the customization and am thinking of going back but using Posterous to post. Still love you guys tho and can't wait for customization!

I guess I could say the same thing about Tumblr. I use Tumblr as a regular blogging platform, and I know tons of other people who do this too. I considered Posterous, but not being able to customize the theme was a deal breaker for me.

Hopefully we'll be able to woo you over soon. raised eyebrow

Yeah, I think they're designed for different niches.

I use Posterous as my platform for publishing content that's text-based - I really like using my email client as a UI, and it makes it easy to post from anywhere. It's also dead simple (once it's set up) for non-technical users to run a blog using that interface, and would be of great use (I imagine) in a situation where bandwidth is at a premium, like in remote environments where all you've got is an expensive satellite uplink.

Tumblr, on the other hand, is very much more of a social/media blog platform. It's got that feature where you can re-blog something and it automatically links back to others who have done that, among other neat features. I'm also a big fan of its bookmarklet for sharing links and media, and while it's fine at doing text, it's in no way exceptional.

In short, I consider Posterous to be a very well-executed text-centered longer-form blogging system, whereas Tumblr is more optimzed for media/content sharing and short-form text - although both would work for either niche.

I write my blog on tumblr and am not aware of any length limit there either

Why does one have to win?

Because it's better linkbait that way.

And then we can have headlines such as

* "Is <this> the <that> killer?"

* "Look out <that>, here comes <this>!

* "10 reasons <that> is dying"

and so on.

I use both, and don't think that will change soon.

Please do you know if it is officially allowed to display ads on tumblr? I saw some tumblr sites with Adsense, but I didn't find in their TOS or Docs that this is permitted. Does anyone know?

They don't aesthetically like the available ad options, so haven't made them available to their users. You shouldn't have a problem doing it yourself.

But that was my question - whether I am allowed to do it. (for example, wordpress.com doesn't allow that).

Update: I've got the answer from their helpdesk that Adsense is allowed.

you can post custom javascript on tumblr. That means you can do pretty much anything you want.