Tumblr or Posterous? My Choice Is…

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The Problem
I wanted to create a stream of all the stuff that I shared online, including (1) photos taken on the go or (2) interesting news found everyday on Google Reader. Then, I wanted this stream to be posted to various social networks, in realtime. At the same time, I didn’t want to use this blog for this purpose.

The Alternatives
After some research, I found that Tumblr and Posterous were the two best alternatives to make that done. While I knew those two services since their launch, I never had the time to really look into them. My only experience with Posterous was in regards of our Twimbow’s blog, but we just needed a quick way to push updates to our users without spending too much time in creating a blog from scratch. On the contrary, I never used Tumblr so far.

The solution

Well, I have to say that none of the alternatives above succeeded in solving my problem completely. While both could easily become my centralized repository for photos shared online and Tumblr could also import my Google Reader Shared Items‘ feed, the latter fails in doing this in realtime since it seems it doesn’t support pubsubhubbub, that is a way to get realtime updates about the news I favorite on Google Reader. The result is that these news get posted all together, something annoying for my Facebook/Twitter friends.

At the same time, I didn’t find an effective way to get my favorite news imported to my Posterous’ stream and auto-posted to my social networks. So, why both could perform the first task, both failed with the second.

The Winner

Despite what I said in the previous point, I ended up sticking with Posterous. You can find my stream here: http://lucafiligheddu.posterous.com.

I found it way lighter than Tumblr and, for sharing photos, the ability to easily do that by email is a winner. Frher om this standpoint, Posterous is just perfect. Moreover, while Tumblr provides a very nice app to share things from my BlackBerry, I found it almost unusable because of its tremendous slowness. Lots of attempts failed because of connection errors and timeouts.

Last but not least, while I clearly understand what Posterous is, Tumblr looks too much for being like Posterous itself and offers few features to compete with WordPress.

Bonus

How did I manage to post my Google Reader shared items to Twitter (at least) in realtime? Well, Google2Tweet does it very well, despite I haven’t found any way to post them to Posterous yet (with an excerpt…).

Tagged as: Evergreen, Google Reader, Online Communities, Posterous, Social network, Tumblr, Twitter, wordpress