Microblogging Wars Escalate: Posterous Claims Tumblr Blocks Its Autopost Feature
From: The Ilana <>
Reply-to: The Ilana <>
When: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:00:24 -0600
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Microblogging Wars Escalate: Posterous Claims Tumblr Blocks Its
Autopost Feature
Posterous users can automatically push content posted to their blogs
onto other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and
so on. Up until recently, people could even post content like text,
pictures and videos to their Posterous account and subsequently have
it auto-posted to a Tumblr blog.
Now, as of this morning it seems, people who try to link a Tumblr blog
to the Posterous service in the latterâs back-end get served the
following notice, which leaves little to the imagination (emphasis
ours):
Link Your Tumblr Account
Your full blog post will get autoposted to your Tumblr. Donât worry
about where youâre going to host your images, files, or music
anymore. Weâll always just do the right thing.
Tumblr autopost has been temporarily disabled â seems like they are
blocking our API requests at present moment. Weâre working on getting
this resolved. In the meantime, you might try emailing Tumblr support
about it.
In other words, Posterous says Tumblr no longer wishes to host content
automatically pushed from Posterous to them, and has thus technically
disabled users from autoposting their content. And Posterous is
telling users it is investigating the issue and âworking on getting
this resolvedâ which means theyâre either talking to Tumblr or
hacking a workaround.
Itâs always possible Tumblr isnât intentionally blocking API
requests from Posterous and that thereâs a technical issue that
Tumblr will resolve. It also appears Tumblr has opted not to block
Posterousâ import tool, which enables people to make the switch to
the latter easier.
Update: and indeed, Tumblr CEO David Karp tells me that Posterous
hasnât been blacklisted at all, and that itâs probably just a case
of them hitting Tumblrâs normal API throttling, which he adds
recently became more aggressive in cases where clients make repeat
requests with bad login credentials.
Karp also points out that theyâre happy to help sort this out and
currently looking into it.
Either way, thereâs clearly been a feud growing between the two
companies, both backed by venture capital firms, as of late. Both
operate in the same, effortless-blogging platform space, and Tumblr is
the bigger one and growing faster, but it has also been around for
longer and definitely feeling
Sent from iPhone, sorry for the typos
