Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous's ass

I think this is actually an unfair comparison. For one thing Tumblr really works the social network aspect of the site (reblogging, hearting articles, following users) whereas posterous is more an "island" blog.<p>Which is fine, as they both solve different problems.<p>I also think Tumblr is a technically superior product as well as a superior designed product (right now): for example I can embed javascript into my Tumblr, posterous doesn't allow that. Tumblr has fantastic iPhone and mobile applications, and generally feels, well, more mature.<p>You mention Posterous have top tier investors and developers, Tumblr does too. Tumblr has spark capital and union square ventures as their investors. Marco Arment, the technical lead at Tumblr is a perfect balance of technical chops, getting stuff done and doing it right.

This reminds me of the article posted here recently about the locations of ancient Woolworth's stores. If you'd written an article 3 months ago that led off with the compete.com graph of the two sites' traffic, you could have written about how Posterous was kicking Tumblr's ass, and used that to support an equally plausible sounding thesis about how this was because they were based in Silicon Valley.<p>This article is like an inverted pyramid, balanced on a couple months' trend in compete.com stats. Not actual traffic stats even, but compete.com estimates of traffic, which as anyone who runs a site knows, can be way off.

I have been waiting for someone to write a post like this. Not because I think it's important to discuss one startup versus the other necessarily - they have very different markets in my mind - but because an exploration of the developing NYC aesthetic is worth examining.<p>I actually think it has a lot to do with early users. In the Bay Area, it's easy to find a large group of beta testers and early users who "get" technology in a profound way that (sadly) no where else in the country does. This contributes to the SV echo chamber and yields a certain type of feedback that in turn creates very distinctly "west coast" products. In New York, the number of truly tech-savvy social web types is much smaller and the majority come from media and advertising - ie, people who care first about design, and second about everything else.<p>While I'm sure the debate could rage all day about <i>real</i> growth and traffic stats, that's not what I took away from this article at all.

Personally I don't really care for the Company A versus Company B frame, or the Region A versus Region B frame. However, I was <i>quite</i> interested in the discussion of how a feature which sounds great to an engineer can have negative consequences for your conversion rates versus something which is quicker to implement/less sophisticated/flies-in-face-of-received-wisdom/whatever.<p>Other examples: "breaking navigation" during conversion funnels, long copy, 10 Ways To Write A Title Cosmo Editors Don't Want You To Know About, etc etc.

There seems to be a contradiction in his argument. He talks a lot about the signup pages, focusing on what he guesses is Tumblr's much higher conversion rate and the reasons for why that conversion rate is high. Shortly thereafter, he lays into Posterous for being too metrics-driven. How could a company that's too metrics-driven let themselves get crushed (again, according to the author's guess) on something as important as signup page conversions?<p>The whole piece has this arbitrary anti-Silicon Valley animus that I don't really get and which doesn't seem to serve any purpose.<p>It's useful to talk about conversion rates, the importance of good UI/UX, and what Tumblr and Posterous do or don't do well, but the broader, hand-waving indictment of Silicon Valley doesn't add anything.<p>(Also, the author doesn't directly do this, but articles like this can falsely suggest that the two companies at hand are playing a zero-sum game.)

Looking at the Tumblr landing page on a touchscreen PC makes me feel like someone is trying to tell me "MASH THE BUTTON WITH YOUR PALM TO MAKE IT GO."<p>It's probably just because I'm not who Tumblr is for, of course. But it's still interesting to ask: can you overdo design simplicity?

Just thought i should mention soup.io (i am not affiliated with them) which i found to be wonderful in design and functionality. It aggregates my flickr, last.fm, picasa updates into one blog and posts new blog entries automatically on facebook. While mobile i can just send new images/texts/links to a cryptic mail address which gets posted. Love it!

Until I realized, just now, that the OP also wrote the article, I felt folks were treating him a bit unfairly. Now, not so much.<p>Pegobry, your point is well taken; I'm an engineer myself, and I agree -- as Web frameworks mature, and engineering/development patterns level off, design becomes the differentiating factor. And yes, provided your numbers are correct, Tumblr currently appears to be "winning." Not sure whether the latter really matters, or whether it even supports the former at all, but it's a concept with which I happen to agree.<p>Your mistake was to post the article here, primarily since you wrote it yourself. Most folks here are engineers who follow YC startups. You might as well have posted a link titled, "Why Microsoft Is Kicking Apple's Ass" in an Apple forum.

First impressions. I get what posterous can do from the get go (faq). I don't have a clue what tumblr can do for me. I scrolled through a load of self flagellation on the about page, and it still didn't tell me. Both have stupid names.<p>After working at a myriad of places doing web work, people tend to skimp on the important little pieces that make a site usable. A lot of the time it's style over substance.<p>I'd have thought tumblr could improve by having the login on the homepage. And I'd prefer to also find a simple paragraph about what it can do.

Don't forget to take into account the year headstart tumblr has had.

To be honest I found this post pretty annoyingly reductive.<p>The essential thesis seems to be: 'I personally speculate that the design of Tumblr's signup page is better, ERGO Tumblr is kicking Posterous' ass.'<p>There are a lot of words in there, but none of them actually help link premise -&#62; conclusion.

I agree with your take on mindset. But eyeballs isn't what makes the company successful in the end, the revenue does. And who has/will have more revenue is an open question for now. Personally I'd put on Posterous.

I use posterous because I like it. Tumblr is slower and isn't as power full when it comes to import/export. Javascript support or pre_made modules would be a plus for posterous as long as they keep is simple as its now.

A blog entry comparing Tumblr with Posterous hosted on Wordpress. Hmmm.<p>What OP <i>does</i> screams much louder than what he <i>says</i>.

"You can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design" is bullshit. Design is a tool, you still have to measure its results, pretty is not equal to better.<p>You can really see this if you look at the history of direct mail, some of the best performing mailers ever were pretty ugly. (source: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Mailings-Dension-Hatch/dp/1566251621" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Mailings-Dension-Hatch/...</a>)