10 reasons Tumblr is better than Twitter
I use twitter, and I’m trying to like it, but tumblr I love. Both services I originally had a hard time initially understanding - I thought why would I want a log of random crap that I found on the internet? But eventually I came around to thinking oh yeah tumbling is basically the next generation of blogging.
- Themes - twitter’s background image and color changes are not really good enough.
- Post via email - twitter has this via a third party service, but it’s baked into tumblr.
- No 140 character limit - I see very few people actually using twitter via SMS, the only benefit of 140 chars is it forces people to be succinct
- Tags - organize your stuff
- Disqus - threads of discussion you can actually follow. This is really hard on twitter, although there are third party services that say they will make it easier.
- Easy Reblog - click a button that is on everyone’s post, you are done! It also shows the chain of reblogs, which is pretty damn cool. (although I wish that this data were more structured for data mining purposes)
- Pictures and Video - support for this baked right in, no need for a third party service. You can even upload. Only disadvantage is tumblr downsizes pictures to 500px.
- Actual urls not tinyurls - I hate tinyurls they don’t show you where you are going.
- “Liked this” - get some moral support for your posts.
- Support for multiple blogs - multiple twitter profiles are hard to do, currently I go the gmail route and keep multiple browsers open.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Group support, rss import, full html posts, per-item privacy, seo, your own domain, etc.
I will say that twitter has a better API and much better community around it. Tumblr has attracted a lot of porn due to its easy picture saving support, and a lot of non-original content since it’s basically a ‘reblog’ engine.
