New Y Combinator startup Posterous launches today with what might be the simplest blogging platform to date. Yes, it’s even easier to use than Tumblr, which has a cult-following of users who like to post lots of pictures and short messages.

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.

Google has added support for Notes to Google Reader, allowing users to share notes or add notes to shared stories.

The add a note feature is located in the “Your Stuff” menu at the top of the Google Reader sidebar. Tumblr style, the feature allows users to share with friends “whatever pops into your head (for better or for worse) by typing anything into the text box at the top of the Notes page,” according to Google.

The share items with a note gives users the ability to add a note with any shared Reader item. Google explains:

If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not “get” why you are sharing it. Use the “Share with note” button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it. Now your friends won’t have to wonder if the B-movie about an evil floor lamp you shared was intended to be funny, sarcastic, ironic or the real motivation behind your next movie night.

Users can also add notes from the browser with a Reader Notes bookmarklet. Minor changes include the choice of new styles from the shared items page, and the Google Reader list view will now highlight when an item is being shared by a friend.

The new additions will provide additional appeal to Google Reader’s sharing feature, which has slowly grown in popularity over the last 12 months (least I see more and more friends sharing this way). The ability to have a discussion around shared feeds is still missing, but as we noted back in September is being developed by Google.

thanks to Bowrd for the tip

It’s not a good day for tumbleblogging. Someone over at Hacker News just noticed that users can access an admin panel for the site by entering a simple admin URL after signing in.

Among the capabilities exposed is the ability to search for users and reset their passwords. You can also change their email addresses, view their activity logs, and change other miscellaneous settings like daily limits on post types.

According to the person who posted the exploit on Hacker News, Tumblr has already been notified of the security hole but apparently has yet to fix it. Update: They’ve just fixed it. It was a known exploit for about an hour. Update 2: Tumblr’s security notice.

A teacher and active blogger named Larry Ferlazzo has put together his list of the top education startups of 2007.

The list was clearly put together with students in mind. And while I’m pretty sure that the average student can get to graduation with little more than Wikipedia, Delicious and perhaps an occasional stolen term paper to help them along the way, I’m glad to see someone highlighting tools to help students learn and present their work.

The list is a good start and includes startups like Footnote, Fleck, Bookr, Sketchcast and others.

Tumblr is, inexplicably, named the top learning aid. “It’s a great place for students to easily post a whole lot of their work” Ferlazzo says.

But here’s what I really want to know – If you are a student, what applications are you actually using to complete your courses? And here’s a second question – if you combined all of the time you spend on all of those sites, would it even come close to the attention you give to Facebook?

(and before you say it in the comments – yes, it is obviously a slow news day with the holidays)

Riding on the buzz behind its stellar tumblelogging network Tumblr and its web-based file distribution utility Senduit, the New York based web design company Davidville, Inc. is positioned to make an audible splash. Its solutions are designed with accessibility in mind, making them appealing to even the most basic of users.

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is varied string of media ranging links and text to pictures and videos that takes very little time and effort to maintain.

Having just celebrated its one month anniversary (it launched on March 1), Tumblr is already used by a growing legion of over 50,000 users — and the numbers get more interesting from there. For every five users on Tumblr there is one post per hour. Although a Tumblr is conducive to mixed-media posts the creators were initially fearful that Tumblr would be heavily weighted toward only one or two of the available mediums. What they’re finding, however, is a healthy spread of all of the flavors currently available to tumblrs, with photos currently owning 34-percent of the posts and other formats tagging along in close succession.

Tumblr utilizes intuitive proprietary web publishing software that offers unparalleled simplicity. In fact, in all of my years online, I’ve never encountered a more transparent publishing utility. There is absolutely no learning curve, just sign-up and start posting. I’ve been running one at Wasteoid.net for about a week now and I’ve tumbled a considerable collection of entries due entirely to its instant gratification posting dynamic.

Because of its simplicity, Tumblr finds itself in a doubly strong position. It is poised to gain the attention of the less web savvy masses who have been wondering for some time “what that blogging stuff is all about.” There is no small value in clinching that demographic — the success of MySpace is a resounding testament to that.

Perhaps more interestingly though, is its ability to fill the wide gap between social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and community sites like Flickr, Delicious, etc. Beyond simply posting directly to Tumblr, users can have Tumblr aggregate feeds from many of the other sites on which they propagate. On Wasteoid, for instance, I’ve set my Tumblr to draw my RSS output from Twitter, Digg, Pipes and other sites. The result is something akin to my digital stream of consciousness, consisting of a homogeneous flow of status updates, links of interest, pictures, text, quotes, conversations and practically anything else that crosses my path during the day.

And there is still a lot more in the works for Tumblr. In April, it will roll out a collection of Tumblr features designed to fuel its expanding community, including additions to connect tumblrs around content and friends, and transparently interact with users outside the Tumblr network. Continuing down the calendar, their goal for May is to begin offering premium account subscriptions for a nominal fee. While Davidville founder Dave Karp assures me that, “[They're] committed to continuing to offer free accounts that are more robust and powerful than any of the other web publishing services,” premium accounts will fulfill a fundamental place for the fledgling network.

In addition to receiving a suite of premium services, pro tumblrs will serve as the primary testbed beta testers for new Tumblr features. This is a keen route as it adds incentive for users to purchase premium accounts and because it provides Tumblr with an expansive testbed of users that not only are familiar with the service, but also have a personal interest in its outcome. Furthermore, there is the boon of adding money to the company coffers for continued expansion — but Karp and crew aren’t banking on just one invention

Back in Feb. they launched Senduit, a web-based utility designed to assist in the sharing of large files over the Internet. Since its launch two months ago, site usage has expanded to 250,000 unique monthly visitors. Over 65,000 files are uploaded each month and downloads are in the ballpark of 500,000. The service manages its bandwidth usage through smart throttling measures used to ensure that its not abused or used for spam and warez.

All of that said, Davidville, Inc. is a company to pay attention to in the coming months. It has in Tumblr a product that any company would froth wildly at the mouth for, a trendy service that is capable of vast mainstream appeal across the demographic lines. Its products have entered my current stable of web tools and aren’t likely to leave anytime soon.