From the desk of Mr. Monk

Posterous just upped its game

There’s no question that Posterous (the blogging platform that bills itself as super simple to use) has made some excellent changes this week. My dilema is; is it too late?

The changes are major in terms of the platforms position. The biggest being theming. You can now choose from posterous designed themes and for the more advanced user there is custom HTML/CSS support.

I asked for this 12 months ago. If it had been done then I wouldn’t have been writing this. Now I have devoted my loyalty to Tumblr. Don’t get me wrong, there are features that need to be added to Tumblr. These are photo post titles and inline images, both of which are irritatingly available on Posterous. Every feature that I want is on Posterous. I should be jumping ship right now. I wrote about Posterous when it first started and had a bit of a chit chat with one of the founders. Now their service is ‘perfect’ right?

Maybe it’s all just a little bit too late. Perhaps when you start a service, certain features should take priority. If this is the case, Tumblr did exactly this. I now have over 12 months of Tumblr posts. I haven’t checked to see if there is an easy migrate option (I’ve had bad experiences in the past) because there is one more factor that sets these platforms apart. Ethos.

Every company has an ethos and we judge them on it. Posterous had come across as sneaky and underhanded to me this week. When they announced theme support, they also announced that Posterous would support existing Tumblr themes. In theory I guess that this is good for everyone including Tumblr and it’s thriving community of theme developers. It does seem a little bit ‘stealth ninja’ though. Posterous and Tumblr are in competiton. Posterous seems to be trying to win by ‘stealing’ Tumblrs hard work. I bet there’s a few guys pissed off at Tumblr HQ.

Tumblr on the other hand seems like a bunch of guys who are passionate about their service and are working hard to listen to the community that supports them and work their asses off to develop new features without improaching on another service.

Tumblr somehow seems to come across as original and Posterous has postitioned themselves as an imitation platform.

Maybe I should have jumped ship, but I’m glad that I didn’t. Posterous however is now an excellent service. It has every feature that a self publisher could want. It’s email feature is excellent and can open up sone very interesting opportunities. I would whole heartedly reccomend both Tumblr and Posterous.

I do wish though that Tumblr would add photo post titles and inline images. Then I wouldn’t have any niggling doubts.

What do you think?