It’s a constant new feature race between Tumblr and Posterous at the moment. As fast as one reveals a new feature, the other reveals something else equally interesting.

And now Tumblr has revealed an official BlackBerry application to let you post text,photos, video, audio and links. It was developed by Mobelux, who also did the Tumblr iPhone app. Apparently BlackBerry Storm 2 owners might experience some issues, but there’s already a workaround.

It does just about everything, including letting you send images and video from your library, or record new video directly from the app itself.

Microblogging has always fitted mobile devices perfectly, whether it’s Twitter, Tumblr or Posterous, and the expanding range of applications which simplify the process of adding more to your content will only improve matters. There’s actually already a Wordpress app for BlackBerry, but I’m not sure I’d want to type a typical entry of mine on a touchscreen or smart phone keyboard. But allow me to fuel a microblogging with link posts, short entries, videos and pictures, and that’s the perfect mobile form of expression.

Tumblr are hosting the app download as a direct link.

The team behind microblogging service Posterous seem to be constantly rolling out new features – they’ve just announced you can now schedule posts anytime in the future.

Posterous allows you to post to your microblog via a bookmarklet, which now includes scheduling options, or via email. If you’re posting via the email method, you just need to add a tag to the subject line of the email to have it automatically scheduled.

They’ve provided four examples, all of which will work:

((delay: in 3 hours))

((delay: in 1337 minutes))

((publish: on 3/12/2011))

((publish: on March 12, 2011))

Not only does this help normal users, but it’ll also be extremely useful for the new business customers which Posterous is courting as one new revenue stream.

Voice-based microblogging has existed for a while with services such as Audioboo and iPadio, but new service Bubbly has started to get coverage after hitting 500,000 users within the first four weeks of launching in India.

The voice-based mobile phone service allows you to share an audio snippet (usually around 30 seconds) with your followers. And it follows on from Bubble Talk which has 100 million users using the service to send voice messages to other individuals.

Users follow by typing in a person’s number or access code and are then updated when there’s new content.It’s free to upload, and the company earns money by taking a cut of the airtime used to listen. And with Bollywood stars among the early adopters of the service, it’s not surprising many of the half million new users are teens and tweens. There’s quite a high level of engagement with each message getting listened to by about 50% of the senders’ followers.

But I don’t think this is the new Twitter.

Mainly because the number of content creators on Twitter is pretty low compared to content consumers, and that seems to be even more of the case with an audio format. Rising all the way to video, which I overlooked when I tipped the original version of Seesmic as the ‘next Twitter’ at an event a couple of years ago.

100 million might be sending messages to other individuals, but how many of the current 500,000 are happy broadcasting and hearing their own voice being played on the mobiles of countless other people?

So far Bubbly has launched in 3 of India’s 23 states, and plans to expand to India, Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Brazil.

In the UK it’ll compete head-on with two existing services, iPadio and Audioboo. Both also offer the opportunity to upload audio from your mobile or a landline and have that audio distributed to followers. Both are gaining users by offering an interesting service, and neither has scaled to Twitter-like heights as yet, despite some very compelling content. And the issue for all three is that people like the thought of being able to sample fame by writing some content or uploading some audio, but there’s a bigger fear barrier to overcome when speaking.

That isn’t a criticism of any of the audio microblogging services. I’m a fan of all of them, I know some of the people behind them fairly well, and I’ve finally installed the PixelPipe workaround to use Audioboo from a Nokia. But to call them the next Twitter is akin to saying live video streaming sites like Ustream or Justin.tv are the next Youtube. Different tools, different distribution and different effects.

Google Buzz may have had a lot of issues when it launched, but it seems as if the team behind it are continuing to fix them in double quick time.

The latest update is that two new controls are coming for the inbox notifications from Google Buzz. The first will let you filter what content starts coming into your email, whilst the second allows you to mute conversations. Revealed in a Google Buzz message, the features are:

‘1) Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox
You’ll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox:
- Comments on your posts
- Comments on posts after you comment on them
- Comments on posts after you are @replied on them
2) Explanations for why posts get sent to your inbox and a “Mute” link
We’re adding a message on the top of each post in your inbox that explains why it’s there (someone commented on your post, you were @replied, etc.). We’re also adding an easy-to-find “mute” link that will stop subsequent comments from bringing the conversation back to your inbox.’

And apparently the team continue to look at the noise issue of Buzz – something which only became apparent after the public release, as all prior testing of the service was done internally at Google. This helped to keep the service secret prior to launch, but also meant that a small and very specific group was involved in testing, and issues such as email addresses being displayed weren’t flagged as problems.

Inspired by the recent decision of U.S TV star Conan O’Brien to follow just one apparently random Twitter user, Leo LaPorte and his guests on last Sunday’s Twit.tv show (John C Dvorak, Kevin Rose and Clayton Morris) decided to follow suit with an added twist – both the Twitter user that was picked and one random follower will win an Apple iPad.

As a result, @LisaTickledPink was chosen by a search for the phrase ‘I hate technology’, and has shot from 2 followers to 17,428 followers at the time of writing. As a result, she’s turned off email notifications from new followers, but has already been interviewed on radio and TV in her native New Zealand.

Meanwhile the subject of Conan’s attention, @LovelyButton, still has a slight lead with 21,218 followers:

In terms of creating attention, Conan and his 616,177 followers are now up against @leolaporte with 172,323, Dvorak’s 65,656, Morris with 20,899, and of course not only Kevin Rose’s 1,157,702, but also the attention gathered via Digg.

Besides the publicity the two stunts have garnered, it’s interesting to compare the relative pull of a showbiz star vs tech stars, and also that attention and fame on Twitter is still often driven via famous endorsement. Neither of the two subjects are inherently are more or less worthy of following because of the attention they’ve had, but the mix of request/prize/attention has seen both followed by tens of thousands of people.

Upcoming racing game Blur combines two of my interests – microblogging and videogames (As you might guess from the recent launch of Online Race Driver).

When it becomes available on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, racers will be able to send Twitter messages from within the game. So you can challenge friends to beat your time from within the game, although you can’t send message between the three games and platforms themselves.

It’s another example of something I recently blogged over at TheWayoftheWeb (Yes, I have three sites currently running in my spare time!), on why ‘The time is right for pervasive social gaming‘.

And integration with Twitter and Facebook is one part of this – and will increase as console-based games converge with the new social gaming phenomena.

I’m a big fan of both Tumblr and Posterous, despite not really having the time/project to make the best use of them at the moment. So the fact that Tumblr has released a new feature, some interesting statistics and signs of new revenue streams launching soon has reignited my thoughts on how I could use the service effectively.

The new feature is the ability to add static pages – which will aid companies and bloggers looking to keep content highlighted. Adding a page is simple, with three layouts to choose from.

And it will only build on some pretty impressive statistics released today – 1 billion page views in February 2010 for starters. It also has 2 million posts every day, 15,000 new posts daily, and 18 new posts and reblogs every second.

Incidentally, 1 billion page views in February equals 36 million page views per day, 25,000 page views per minute, or 400 per second. And Tumblr has put together a nice infographic to show off the info:

And if that isn’t enough, apparently there are also plans to unveil two new revenue generating features next month, powered by the widget mysteriously pictured below:

For a personal or simple company blog, I’d definitely recommend checking out Tumblr or Posterous. They’re easier to update than a traditional hosted blog platform (whether Blogger or Wordpress), and offer as many design options etc. Ultimately a full self-hosted blog platform such as Wordpress (Which this site uses) offers some additional advantages, but if you don’t want the hassle or advertising, then go with the microblogging platforms.

The Shorty Awards are held annually, with nominations and votes submitted by anyone via Twitter, combined with voting by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. Twitter client Tweetdeck was one of the 26 category winners announced last week.

The Shorty Awards

Tweetdeck won the Apps category ahead of Hoosuite, Mr Unfollowers, ColourLovers, MailChimp and AggreTweet. Other winners included @BettyDraper, @WholeFoods, and @NathanFillion.  You can see the full list of winners on the Shorty Awards website.

A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

Sponsored Post

Having spent some time running advertising with Twitter, I know how divisive it can be – and seeing as I know there’s a big group who split their time between microblogging and full-length blogging, I thought it was worthwhile accepting an offer for a sponsored post on the UK launch of blogging monetisation service Ebuzzing.

It’s fast and simple to register, and the main benefit is that you can achieve a good rate of reward for recommending or allowing services to advertise or pay for a post – but the choice of topics etc is entirely down to you. There’s no obligation to post anything you don’t agree with.

I’ve used Ebuzzing for a post on TheWayoftheWeb, and found it easy to use. There are three options to pick from – sponsored articles, videos served by a dedicated player, or videos and banners served in a syndicated player.

All posts are “no follow” within articles, and full disclosure and advertiser names have to be displayed, meaning no room for any shenanigans, and no risk of search engine penalties. And over 600 brands have used the service to propose campaigns including Coca-Cola, MTV, MasterCard, Toyota, etc.

So if you’d rather monetise your blog than your microblogging, then Ebuzzing is a simple and effective way to discover opportunities to do it for a decent reward, rather than struggling to optimise affiliate links for what might be small audiences, or having to go and attract direct advertising. And having seen an increasing amount of content providers beginning to use in-Twitter advertising, I’d hazard a guess that microblogging-related advertisers will be looking to place content via Ebuzzing in the future.

Register on ebuzzing.com