Yes, so I've seen. My take is basically this: they're experimenting, and you have to give them kudos for that, and since this is a web startup they can work out the kinks as they refine their system.
They don't contradict my thesis since Tumblr was always much bigger than Posterous and while they may have had faster growth it was never enough to catch up.
Again -- I may be proven wrong in six months or a year, and if so I admit it publicly right here (in fact, do you want to make a bet?). But I think at this stage the data warrants the trend I extrapolate from it.
If you have actual traffic stats I'd love to see them. ;)
Also, the estimate isn't for "a couple months", but for the past 12 months, and the trend points in one direction. Even less reliable but even more "damning" is Google Trends: http://google.com/trends?q=tumblr,+posterous&ctab=0&...
That being said, your general point is right: nothing is preordained, and the trends could switch around tomorrow, and the picture look much different a while from now. But that's why I have a blog: this is the situation as I see it today. Maybe six months from now I'll eat my words, who knows?
You're right -- obviously this isn't a post mortem or anything. The trends could reverse, and Posterous could become wildly profitable with less users while Tumblr has plenty of traffic but no money.
Although it seems pretty obvious that both are headed for a combination of advertising/freemium model, and the revenue that comes from that seems pretty correlated to userbase size.
Thanks for the kind advice. For me, blogging is a conversational medium, I try to write blog posts the way I would speak, and so it's pretty unfiltered. Also I try to be engaging. And insofar as my opinion/analysis has any value, I think it's better for those concerned that it be unvarnished. I don't believe most things should be sugarcoated, and I don't think the kind of people who do startups do either.
The signup pages are an example of a broader mindset which is different at Tumblr and at Posterous and which in turn, to me, exemplifies broader trends for startups. That's what I think is interesting.
I'm not saying startups should not be metrics-driven. Design and engineering are both driven by metrics. But they're different mindsets. And in this case, one is clearly winning.
You're also right that the zero-sum fallacy is wrong. However, those two companies are competitors in the market and one, at least on publicly available data, is winning hands down.
The Compete data seems to show Posterous stagnating just shy of 1M uniques for the past few months while Tumblr's curve is stuck "up and to the right," though.
Am I trolling? I don't think so, insofar as I use a provocative example to illustrate trends that I do think are important: the coming of age of New York as a startup hub and as a "school" for building consumer startups, and the growing importance of design vs. "hard" technology in building a successful consumer web app.
You're right that Tumblr's social aspects are more developed than Posterous's and that this has been a huge driver of their growth but to me that's not so much solving two different problems as Tumblr being more smartly designed -- realizing that blogging, even minimalist blogging, is inherently social.
As for Tumblr's top tier investors -- sure, that's true. I was trying to emphasize that Posterous, on paper, has everything it takes to win.
I think it was only six months. And first mover advantage means little online. Facebook wasn't the first social network, Twitter wasn't the first microblogging app, etc. Posterous's had a year and a half now and it's stagnating.
About the iMac? I read about it in "iCon", the Steve Jobs biography (much less hostile that its title would seem to indicate), and a couple places on the web if memory serves, but I couldn't tell you where.
Small nitpick: Gruber says Jobs killed the Newton not out of spite but because his skill is in creating new products, not improving other people's.
But the problem with that is that the original iMac, the product that made Apple relevant again, was conceived before Jobs' return. To be sure, he added his magic to the product that eventually came to market, but it was very much the case of Jobs imroving on someone else's product. (As was the case, more debatably, for the iPod)
The difference wasn't that Jobs dreamt them up from start to finish -- it was that he could take credit for them from start to finish.
Let's be realistic here for a second. If Apple manufactured in the US, not only would its products be twice as expensive, I'm pretty sure they would be equally, if not more shoddy. GM and Chrysler, after all, aren't exactly known for the reliability of their products or the quality of their manufacturing...
Companies that have had shoddy products coming out of China are companies that don't pay attention to their supply chain -- and Apple is fanatical about supply chain management.
Furthermore, the ethical problem of manufacturing in China isn't the same as that of practicing censorship in China. If tomorrow Western companies got out of China, besides unleashing an economic apocalypse that would make the last two years look like a rainy picnic, China wouldn't suddenly turn into Sweden. It would turn into Cuba, or North Korea. An angrier, more nuclear-armed North Korea. Nobody would win in this scenario, least of all the Chinese citizens we all want to eventually live in a prosperous, democratic country.