Time for Miniblogs to Get Different

As you know, the rumour is that the cool kids aren’t blogging anymore. Oh no, they’re microb­log­ging (Twitter, Facebook), or what I’m going to call min­ib­log­ging (tumblr, Posterous, Soup.io). Miniblogging is more than status updates, but not as onerous as a fully-​​fledged blog.

This category has really taken off in the last year. The not-​​so-​​reliable figures from Compete suggest their number of users has trebled over the last twelve months, some­thing that you’ll already know anec­dot­ally from the number of links you’ve encountered to these sites in your daily reading.

These sites are very similar in most respects, with a few genre-​​defining characteristics:

• Automatic import of social network content e.g. photos from flickr, deli­cious bookmarks.
• Quick posting using a book­marklet (a javas­cript activ­ated from a bookmark in your browser’s toolbar).
• Emphasis on frequent, short-​​form content rather than lengthy essays.
• Easy to repost others’ content, some­thing that’s encour­aged and seen as a mark of respect rather than ripping people off.
• Content is often ephemeral.
• Posts likely to be ‘sec­ondary’ inform­a­tion – a youtube video, a picture you found else­where, a quote from someone in a main­stream website source.

Tumblr has been around the longest. And appears to be the market leader, with around three times the users of the other two. The dif­ferent networks have a slightly dif­ferent vibe. Tumblr users seem to be younger (on average), more likely to post images or mul­ti­media than words and the site seems more sociable than the others. There are some great music blogs on it. It also picked up some geek appeal through the ability to auto­mat­ic­ally pick up on tags or a custom RSS feed such as the PRFail blog. Perhaps most cru­cially on its path to main­stream accept­ance, the platform has also attracted celebrities such as Katy Perry and John Legend.

Posterous is tech­nic­ally superior to Tumblr, with its killer post-​​by-​​email feature taking a lot of pain out of posting from a mobile, posting MP3s and video. It also does a clever auto­matic posting to your other sites depending on rules you choose. Despite (or maybe because of) these tech­nical innov­a­tions, though, it appears to have attracted a smaller but wordier crew, who use the platform as an easier, cheaper blog. A lot of the people whose regular blogs I follow have adopted Posterous as a lower-​​commitment, low main­ten­ance sec­ondary site (e.g. Steve Rubel, Charlie Peverett).

I’ve tried all of them and have cur­rently settled on the underdog Soup.io as a sec­ondary site. I set up a tumblr a long time ago but made the mistake of making it a lifestream site. As it turns out, my life is quite boring and trivial, espe­cially if you’re not me, so the site was boring and trivial too. Posterous seemed like a good idea, but I realised I was using it as a proxy for posting here, which seemed a bit point­less. I was looking for four things, ultimately:

• a better book­marking site than deli­cious, one that would capture pictures, videos, and music as well as bookmarks.
• a scrap­book for things I find inter­esting and want to keep/​share but don’t warrant a blog post here. Sometimes it’s a place where I gather mater­ials for a future article.
• some curation of my social networks – it auto­mat­ic­ally gathers favour­ites from youtube, ffffound, visualize.us etc. Theoretically, I will be able to find these later without visiting lots of separate sites.
• but without the boring bits – it doesn’t gather status updates or twitter conversations.

The Soup.io platform is not perfect any means – nav­ig­a­tion and search are rather too minimal when it comes to finding things you posted more than a few days ago. You can use tags, but there’s no tag cloud. There aren’t any cat­egories. There are permalinks, but they don’t contain any intel­li­gible inform­a­tion. However, it looks OK out of the box, and the posting book­marklet is fant­astic. There’s also pretty much no limit on how much you post or import.

There’s a bigger worry over this whole sector, though.

None of these plat­forms cur­rently have any form of advert­ising, premium features or any other way to make their business sus­tain­able. That’s a worry if you post much content direct to the site. It would feel like a terrible waste if your site’s owners went bust and closed down the server. Lifestreaming non-​​starter Storytlr will pre­sum­ably not be the last site in this crowded sector to be closed down.

The trouble is that if (say) tumblr starts posting advert­ising on people’s pages, their users could easily dump the platform and move to a com­pet­itor. The same goes for premium features: if one started to offer (say) a lightbox plug-​​in for snazzier picture display as a $5 a month extra, its com­pet­itors would be motiv­ated to imme­di­ately offer the same feature for free.

So is min­ib­log­ging doomed? Or all but one of them?

Not quite, but it’s tricky. Survivors might focus on offering a tech­nical USP that its com­pet­itors can’t match, which seems unlikely, and not neces­sarily a saving grace, as the tumblr vs pos­terous figures show. Otherwise, they could try to create loyalty to the platform, which is again improb­able since their whole attrac­tion is low com­mit­ment. There are social features on each, which could work to spark the loyalty of users – but these tend to be very lo-​​fi – I find it hard to believe that many people care about the number of Posterous sub­scribers they have, for example. Similarly, I can’t see the trick of offering brands their own pages for a sizeable fee working too well, since they don’t have anywhere near the reach of Facebook or MySpace fan pages.

To me, the solution lies in greater dif­fer­en­ti­ation. It’s not the case that only one of these plat­forms can win, but they do need to become dif­ferent from each other. For as long as the format and features are the same on each, then they are after exactly the same users, which is very clearly a less-​​than-​​zero-​​sum game.

Tumblr has attracted cre­at­ives, as I men­tioned, and so maybe should do more to allow art works, music and pho­to­graphy to be seen/​heard at their best. Perhaps build in a really simple eco­m­merce solution so that artists can sell or license their content. Posterous could perhaps do more for word­smiths, or go com­pletely the opposite dir­ec­tion and create a paid-​​for review platform (I don’t condone this, but it seems to be a business model). Maybe one site should get serious about being all-​​about mul­ti­media book­marking; or get serious about being a col­lab­or­a­tion platform.

There’s still the threat that com­pet­itors will imple­ment every new feature, but the more these sites define their niches, probably as directed by existing user beha­viour, the less likely it becomes that this will happen, since those com­pet­itors would blur the defin­i­tions of their own niches by doing so.

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