TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

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Posterous is launching the the feature with five built-in themes, including one designed by well known Tumblr theme creator Bill Israel. Posterous is also allowing users to change their blog header and to custom modify any colors on their site.

Beyond basic visual changes, Posterous has bigger plans for its theme engine. Widgets, for one, will have their own open API so that anyone can write widgets that can then be embedded into Posterous users blogs. For more technical folks, the site will also be introducing more features that will gradually turn Posterous into a content platform. Examples of this are the PostLocation block that Posterous added recently internally so that they could support GPS / Geocoded locations for posts.

People often compare Posterous to Tumblr due to the simplicity of the way to upload content, but Posterous is leveraging Tumblr’s set of themes. This is a huge step for Posterous, considering Tumblr has thousands of beautiful themes that exist out there, and it’s a matter of changing just a few lines of HTML to convert them to full-fledged Posterous themes.

Posterous has seen enormous growth over the last 12 months. The site is doing 10 times the traffic they were doing one year ago, and over the last 30 days alone, traffic has gone up to 4.1 million unique visits worldwide, according to Quantcast. Posterous is proving that they are a force to be reckoned with.

In June 2009, Posterous acquired Skinkset and brought on Brett Gibson on board to the team of 3 people. Posterous has taken $740K in funding from investors like Guy Kawasaki, Tim Ferriss, Mitch Kapor, Satish Dharmaraj, Eric Hahn, and of course Y-Combinator.

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Now Posterous co-founder Garry Tan just checked in to let us know the iPhone app that had been submitted about 15 days ago has finally been approved by Apple and live in the App Store (iTunes link).

Unfortunately, it’s a bit underwhelming.

It’s not that the app, dubbed PicPosterous, doesn’t do what is advertised on the product website, it’s just that I wish it did a little more. Billed as ‘Your iPhone Instant Camera’, you can basically use the iPhone 3GS’ camera to shoot both pictures and videos, which you can subsequently add to virtual albums and upload directly to your Posterous blog.

When you log on to the app using your registered Posterous account (which you don’t necessarily need to have to use it), you can manage multiple sites, create private albums and auto-post whatever you upload to your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and FriendFeed stream.

The app is capable of geo-tagging photos and videos, so you can switch on a location map online next to each album. The nice thing about it is that you can add a first picture to an album and then simply keep uploading photos to that album for as long as you like, so the pictures are not each posted as a separate blog post when you send them in.

A couple of gripes though. First, when you send pictures or videos to your Posterous blog, it’s impossible to add any kind of text or link to the body of the post from within the app (something I was able to do when I simply e-mailed in photos I took with my iPhone camera using the mail application). Second, when you add multiple pictures to one album you can’t delete individual pics afterwards, leaving you only the option to clear the entire album and start over. Third, you need to use your iPhone camera in landscape mode when you want your pictures to come out right on your blog, something that’s not indicated anywhere and you need to find out yourself (update: apparently, it auto-corrects but only after you sent the link to the badly oriented photo to your Twitter, FriendFeed etc. stream). And finally, while you can turn off the auto-post feature, it would be nice if you could get the option to send it to e.g. only your Twitter or Flickr account rather than all or nothing.

Great to finally see Posterous come out with an iPhone, but I sincerely hope they keep improving it based on my and other users’ feedback to make it as satisfying an experience as the actual web service.

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If you’re a TypePad user, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. And you can just as easily push the content back out to other services such as Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed while you’re at it, which is entirely in line with what Posterous has been all about since its inception. To complement the new feature, Six Apart is also adding some new custom themes to TypePad, starting with the Pico template the company introduced yesterday.

The only difference with Posterous that I can see is the support and training Six Apart provides with its TypePad service and the fact that you can add advertising units to your new mini-blog, although I can’t imagine this will convince many individuals to actually pay for a microblogging service when there are so many free alternatives.

Or will it?

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Both Slinkset and Posterous launched last summer as part of the same Y Combinator class. Slinkset is a white-label service for building your own custom social news site in a matter of seconds (think Digg, but with your own logos and a customized design). Slinkset isn’t the only company in this space — when it launched last July I noted its similarities to a handful of other services, including Reddit, which had recently gone open-source and allowed for custom sites. But while it may not be terribly unique, it’s easy to see why the Posterous team is interested in Slinkset.

Posterous cofounder Garry Tan says that the company is going to build “massively engaging sites for both content discovery (via social news) and content posting (via blog streams)”. Beyond that details are scant, but it’s not difficult to imagine the kind of features Posterous may begin to implement. Up until this point the site has been heavily focused on helping you share content, but there hasn’t been much in the way of social interaction. Slinkset’s technology will definitely help with that — my guess is that there will soon be an option to allow users to upvote posts on your Posterous account, causing the most popular media and blog posts to float to the top.

Aside from the acquisition, Posterous is pushing forward on other fronts. The site has released optimized support for the new iPhone 3GS, allowing users to Email videos directly from the phone which are then automatically rotated properly and posted to your Posterous blog (as well as any other services you have linked to it, like Facebook). The service also now supports importing blogs from major platforms including Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr (the site will automatically import both text and media files into your Posterous page).

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Update: shame on me for forgetting that TechCrunch also has its ‘own’ short URL (tcrn.ch), which you can view under every post and which we use for our Twitter account. We use awe.sm for this.

The latest startup to add a URL shortening feature to its service is UnHub, which we covered last month. Paste any URL after unhub.com and if you’re registered for the service, you’ll get a custom short URL you can use to distribute links to articles and such. On top of the linked website will be an iframe (yes, yet another one) where you can view the number of Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, and redirects on bit.ly. You can also tweet, e-mail or share the link on a plethora of third-party services right from the toolbar. It’s also personalized, so people can jump to your own UnHub profile from the persistent bar, or straight to the source link. For an example, go to http://unhub.com/pC16.

Another one that just surfaced (in alpha mode) is Lnk.by, which adds a twist to URL shortening in the sense that you can pick a short URL that suits what you’re linking to i.e. it brings some context to what you’re sharing. You can share music files using Lstn.in, videos with Wach.it, photos with Seee.it and articles with Read.im. The service automatically maps known domains, protocols and file extensions so it will pick the most suitable one without the need for indicating it proactively. Other than that, there’s nothing really noteworthy about the service, apart from the fact it comes with an API and a toolbar bookmarklet, and that it was built by an Endemol executive with a friend in just one weekend.

Feel to shorten the URL for this article with both services and tell us which one you prefer (or why you hate URL shortening services).

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The race is on to become the dominant media sharing site on Twitter, with favorites like TwitPic and newcomers including PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo vying for popularity as Twitter begins to hit the mainstream. Now Posterous is looking to join the race with a new API that developers can integrate into their Twitter apps with a minimal amount of effort.

We’re big fans of Posterous, the dead-simple blogging tool that makes it incredibly easy to post text, photos, and other media online. To post a photo or post to the site, you simply send an Email message to the generic post@posterous.com address, and the site does the rest. And you can optionally have the service automatically syndicate each of these posts to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and a number of other services.

Now, Posterous is looking to become even more convenient. Its new API allows developers to add Posterous support to their Twitter clients, which means you’ll soon be able to send photos to the service from your iPhone or desktop much the same way you would with TwitPic or one of its many competitors (assuming the clients integrate the service – more on that later).

But Posterous isn’t looking to simply serve as yet another competitor offering a near-identical featureset. Instead, the company believes that its blogging platform is superior to the basic photo galleries offered by other services (and Michael agrees – he’s been posting his photos here). The service supports multiple photo uploads at once, which are automatically placed into photo galleries, and can also generate embeddable players for audio and video files (though its API is starting off with support for images only). Users can optionally use their own domain names with the service, which means that they can more easily track analytics. And finally, users can download media in its original format, while some competitors only offer compressed versions for download.

I prefer Posterous to the other image platforms because it’s much more flexible. But as I wrote yesterday about TwitGoo, the key to the service’s success (at least as a TwitPic alternative) will lie in getting integrated into popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie. It’s not clear how selective these clients are at this point, but they’re going to have have to start making choices, otherwise users are going to be overwhelmed with the number of services they have at their disposal. That said, Posterous is making the process as easy as possible on developers, as it uses the “exact same methods, parameters, and response codes” as TwitPic.

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Evidently, the image is hosted by ImageShack, so this is just another way for the company to get more people to learn about their media hosting wares. Once the image is up (example showing a guy eating a yfrog), you get the usual stuff like embed codes, custom thumbnails, a direct link to reblog and retweet the material, etc. We should note – and I’m getting tired of having to say this every time – that you have to enter your Twitter credentials to use Yfrog so that’s up to you.

Like TwitPic, YFrog has its own API, but the former is also built into most popular Twitter clients, so they have the advantage of already being familiar to most Twitter users who are interested in this type of service. TwitPic, which by the way is growing in traffic quite quickly, also enables you to comment on pictures on-site, has better navigation, tags and lets you view images in full size. Yfrog has some catching up to do in terms of features and integrating into the widely used Twitter clients.

Personally, I switched to Posterous some time ago, which lets you e-mail photos from your desktop or web client as well as your mobile phone and pushes the link for short blog posts, pictures and videos to a variety of social services (including Twitter). Also, it doesn’t show ads next to your uploaded pictures.

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This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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What I like about it – you don’t have to create an account to use it. Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.

Today the company is announcing a new product, group blogs. You can add your friends or family’s email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too. It’s useful for families, sports teams, etc. to share photos and video. Once you’ve added those emails, all they have to do to post is send whatever they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com. No registration required. An example is here, and see the image below.

Posterous is a Y Combinator startup. They also just raised a second angel round of financing – $725,000 from XG Ventures and a whole bevy of high profile individuals.

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The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch and have launched already.

TicketStumbler

TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”.

People and Pages

While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place.

MeetCast

MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity.

CO2Stats

For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today.

Youlicit

Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google.

Job Alchemist

Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, and a new job affiliate network called JobSyndicate that launches today. Publishers can place JobSyndicate’s widgets on their sites and earn half the bounty set by employers when visitors click through and get hired.

Frogmetrics

Frogmetrics isn’t a pure web venture: the company wants to place touch screens in restaurants, stores, and other brick and mortar establishments that can be used to collect customer feedback on the spot. The devices ask customers a few questions at the point of sale about their experience and can collect contact information about customers to generate leads. The information gathered across physical locations is aggregated and analyzed for trends and other statistics.

Snipd

Snipd appears to be another web annotation service, one that allows users to “snip” page content such as images, videos, and text to share them with others and save for later. These snips are also used to generate so-called heat maps of pages that help users find the best content on a page. The service has yet to launch.

BackType

BackType is a search engine for comments that crawls the internet for blogs and indexes their user generated content regardless of the platform (WordPress, Moveable Type, etc). These comments are not only keyword searchable but can be followed by author, allowing you to keep track of what your friends are saying online.

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Here’s how you create a blog on Posterous – email something to post@posterous.com. You’re done.

Here’s how you post something new on Posterous – see paragraph above. The subject line of the email is the post title, the text area is the content. You can also email photos, videos and sounds files, which will be displayed in a custom Flash player on the site. My new Posterous blog, for example, is here.

Is this a lot like Tumblr? Yes, although account creation by a single message to a generic email is a great way to help this spread via mobile devices (you have to create an account on Tumblr’s website first, then you can start emailing to a unique email id). Posterous also has comments on posts, something Tumblr is just starting to roll out to some users.

Another great thing about Posterous – you can choose to have comments emailed to you, and you can reply to the comment by simply responding back to the email (I wish Wordpress had that feature). If you choose to register your account at Posterous (which means creating a password), you can also follow other Posterous bloggers.

The services are otherwise somewhat similar. Both are excellent for simply emailing in vacation photos and videos.

One problem Posterous may have is fake posts via masked emails (it’s relatively easy to mask emails so that they appear to be sent from anyone you like). Posterous says they’ll watch header information like IP address, email client and other data points to sniff out fakes, and users can also request a unique email. We’ll see how they do with that – and we’ll give a free TechCrunch Tshirt to the first person who manages to do a fake post on our Posterous blog (but it can’t be off color, disgusting, or NSFW in any way) (Update: ok, we have a winner).

Tumblr is a lot more feature rich than Posterous, which make sense since Posterous is only two months old and has two employees. But Posterous is dead simple to use and does the mobile blogging thing very well. New features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.

Both Posterous and Tumblr compete with services like Twitter, Friendfeed and a slew of mobile/photo blogging platforms like Mobog and others mentioned here.

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