Twitter vs Tumblr

Introduction There has been a lot of talk recently about the micro blogging. Micro blogging is a blogging platform that lets you post very small updates about your life, to help keep you and your friends up to date with each others lives. The services are kept very simple so anyone can use them easily.

Two of the biggest players in this field are Twitter.com and Tumblr.com. I don"t have any friends on any of these services so I decided to try them both out and see what they are like.

Who is more popular One for the first things I do when evaluating two different online communities is look at the usage statistics. I usually will go with the bigger company, more stable, more secure, etc. According to compete.com twitter.com seems to have a pretty good lead on tumblr.com. +1 point for twitter.com

Domains I like having my own sub domain, personal preference that comes from the old geocities days. tumblr.com provides a sub domain while twitter.com doesn"t. https://twitter.com/funvill http://funvill.tumblr.com/ +1 point for tumblr.com

Who owns your data I am very paranoid about losing my data or a free service that becomes pay and holds my data ransom. These are things that wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Lucky both of these sites allow for offsite backups and YOU OWN your own data. They also let you use your own domain just incase your mini blog ever becomes super popular and you want to switch services. +3 points for twitter.com +3 points for tumblr.com

Post categories tumblr.com lets you identify posts under media types such as text, photos, links, chat, audio, video, etc. twitter.com doesn"t let you set a category. +1 point for tumblr.com

How do I create a new post Both allow you to post via IM, Email, Phone, Client, API, etc +5 points each twitter.com, tumblr.com

Themes look and feel Twitter.com only gives you the very basic theme options, good enough for most people. Tumblr.com other hand gives you full control while keeping it simple enough for the basic user to use. +2 points for tumblr.com (I really like there theme viewer/editor)

Conclusion Go with whatever service has more of your friends on it. There both pretty much the same. If you are the first or a trendsetter I would suggest tumblr.com. I personally will not be switching off of Wordpress myself. Wordpress is just too powerful and I can host it on my own servers (+10,000 points) my own paranoia wont let me use any of these services for too long.

9 points for twitter.com 12 points for tumblr.com