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Comment by joubert | Hacker News Reader

i think tumblr is better for "sharing rich media"

Tumblr is a microblog. Posterous is a full blog + website creator that doesn't have to impose artificial limitations and post types in order to be simple.

Exactly what artificial limitations are you referring to? Tumblr has an extensive theme engine, even a marketplace to sell those themes, a developer API, and an outstanding tumblr discovery system.

I don't seen anything artificial or limiting about any of that.

one photo per post, 5 minutes per video, one audio file per week. can't mix media in a single post.

Our goals for Posterous are just totally different than what Tumblr is going for. We're aiming for Wordpress.com, not a microblog.

So I take it you represent Posterous, since you use 'we'.

You should know, you can create photo sets with tumblr, allowing multiple images. i.e. more than just one.

One audio file per week hasn't been around since ver. 1 of tumblr. I'm not exactly sure where you're drawing your talking points, but they're simply...incorrect.

He's the guy in the video.

Having themes and a customizable header image doesn't make it a "full website creator".

Posterous has some nice features but its place in the market seems a little undefined. It's more than Tumblr and less than Wordpress.com, which with the widgets available for hosted sites can do pretty much everything Posterous does (if at times in a less attractive way) and quite a bit more.

What about the new pages feature tumblr just rolled out in the last few weeks, it even lets you define a mobile specific stylesheet without having to use JS and detect the browser..

I don't know if I'd call it "artificial" exactly, but last time I checked, Posterous was limited by how big of an email you can send (gmail limits to 20 or 25 mb, I think). Have they opened up on-site uploads yet?

yep, new web editor that allows uploads and editing of all posts.

cool! that was one of my original hangups, if i can call it that.

I don't think it's "better" per se but rather more tailored toward a different group of people. Each one has their pros.

That said, Tumblr's features seems to be a subset of posterous these days. I am a big tumblr user, but I ended to migrating to Posterous for it's much less work for even greater sharing power.

Maybe my use case is weird, but I found Posterous annoying. I tried to use it over and over and every time I hit some weird limitation that kept me from doing what I wanted.

The final straw was posting code. Tumblr makes that stupid easy (since they accept Markdown), so I can just do that instead of trying to figure out the magic incantation to make it work on Posterous (gists or something? I don't know. It wasn't documented when I last tried).

Did you know we support embedding Github Gists? Just paste the gist URL and we do the rest.

Markdown etc has been a much-wanted feature, even for ourselves internally. We try to focus on normals as much as possible, so it hasn't hit the top of our priority list yet, but it has been rising in the list without a doubt.

Right. I suppose Sachin has to say that Posterous is for everyone, but it's really not. Those who want to socially share within a walled community will continue to use Facebook. Those who want to curate their media online without as much context will continue use Picasa, Flickr, and the others. So Posterous' niche will involve some mix of people in between, I think.

I will say though that their service is dead simple to use. But then again the Facebook and Flickr exporters are pretty easy to use, too.

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