I've got to admit to taking a certain guilty pleasure in these numbers after Posterous' last campaign to get switchers. They were pompous, arrogent, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition. I'm pleased to see that such nasty tactics (apparently) paid little dividends.
I was actually about to use Posterous, but the campaign brought my attention to Tumblr, which previously I thought was just a tumble-log, not a blog with complete features.
After checking out Tumblr, it was not clear to me that Posterous was the better product and there were some issues with DDOS attacks at the same time. Also I saw two other people I knew using Tumblr as well.
If Posterous really became the clear-cut best blogging platform someday, I could always switch over with the switch tool, so the decision to use Tumblr for now was an easy one.
I swear, this might be hard to believe for some, this is EXACTLY the reason I tried out tumblr and ended up having a permanent blog there. It gave me the impression that tumblr was doing something right for posterous to try to "snag" their users.
I heard about tumblr all these years but never tried it before. Its funny how things work.
I found out that Posterous could not successfully import my Tumblr blog posts despite several attempts, which wasted a good bit of my time and made me inclined never to try the service again.
Wow, that's harsh man. Back earlier in the year I switched to them for my blog for a site I run on the side. Long story, but in a fit of infrastructure floundering I misconfigured my DNS settings and ended up sending them ALL my traffic. Gary went above and beyond by 'fixing' the issue with some internal routing trickery, and then kindly letting me know what I did that next morning.
I felt pretty sheepish about it, but I never got the impression those guys were any of the things you say here. To each his own!
Posterous is still superior in my opinion, regardless of users or traffic. It's the simplest, most intuitive platform I've used to date. Their source editor is sweet too. If I need to add some links, or change the entire template, I can, very easily... seems like it's user and hacker focused. No clutter, and they give complete control.
I'm not saying Tumblr does not have these traits, frankly, last time I used Tumblr was years ago, but no reason to write an article that assumes there is some kind of "finish line."
"pompous, arrogant, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition" Come on dude! Are they supposed to do it any different? Their "Import/Switch to" campaign was very creative, aggressive, and got a lot of new sign ups. I took notes, instead of complain...
Yes they are supposed to do it differently, at least if they wanted to keep me as a customer. While I use Posterous just for pushing to multiple destiantions (which it does brilliantly), I moved the primary site I was using Posterous for back to Tumblr specifically because of that campaign.
As s product manager, I've worked on switching campaigns before, but the manner in which Posterous chose to do so made me lose all faith in whether they cared about their customers or was it win at all cost.
