To Tumblr or not to Tumblr? That is the question…
You know when you have these seemingly brilliant ideas and someone has already blogged about them? Yeah, that’s the feeling I have when writing about Tumblr. One of the most recent Web 2.0 (highly praised by my blogofriend Heather Watson), I heard about it for the first time at VIDFEST 2008, precisely from Heather (aka Hez). I then discovered that Jarrett also has a Tumblr. Then Dan mentioned he had a Tumblr too.
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Ryan Nadel, who works in the journalism/film/media industry, at a lovely party hosted by Candice Faktor, of OurFaves.com. This small gathering of good friends proved a great laboratory to have actually good conversations, and Ryan and I engaged on a discussion of Tumblr. Ryan does have a Tumblr account, and (to my surprise I might admit) I have found at least two other friends of mine who do.
Remember – I am not in media, nor journalism, nor public relations, nor tech per-se. I am a specialist in environmental studies who loves blogging. So, for me to hear about Tumblr, it was a bit like “this is the new Twitter or the new Plurk“. It would seem to me as though Tumblr.com would be the place where I could synthesize all my online stuff (portfolio) and go from there. My friend Andy calls his Tumblr “his brain dump“.
My question is – is that the direction in which Web 2.0 is going? I am having a hard enough time with FriendFeed, BrightKite, and all that jazz. Not sure about how to feel about Tumblr. Any thoughts? Do I really want to get yet another Web 2.0 application? Particularly, can I hear some thoughts from those of you who actually have Tumblr.com accounts? Thanks.
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Tumblr’s been around for a long time. It’s just another free blogging service, with a few neat things. I use mine to syndicate and collect things I do elsewhere, sort of like FriendFeed.
It’s got a very nice Archive feature. If I ever get tired, or too poor, of paying for TypePad I might switch to that or Vox.
http://jefferysimpson.tumblr.com/
One of my comments snowballed into a blog-length post, so I posted it on my tumblr (fittingly enough). You can find the details and aimless rambling there, but it all comes down to the final summation:
What it comes down to is that if you don’t want to go to Friendfeed and get an aggregation of everyone’s aggregation of everyone’s activities, then don’t. If you have a use for tumblr, use it. If you don’t want something on your tumblr page, remove it. Change things around, subscribe to different things, change your style. Find out what the service can do for you, not what you should do with the service. If the answer is grand, then go for it. If it’s bland, then let it lie.
It looks interesting. I signed up. I don’t know why.
Tumblr kicks ass. That is all.
Thanks for the shout out. My tumblr is a synthesis of my twitter account and my wordpress site. I use tumblr the most. It’s the casual conversation in my digital dialogue, consider twitter the water cooler, wordpress the dinner table, and tumblr a quick cup of coffee with a friend in the afternoon.
Also, I love its simple elegance.
Ditto Ryan’s comment above. Thanks for the shout-out. I’m loving Tumblr — the interface, the look & feel, the ‘re-blog’ function, and the generally high quality content on other tumblogs. My only issue has been that Google has a tough time indexing Tumblogs, due to image-heavy posts, so my search traffic has been next to nil. Oh yeah, that and I can’t easily integrate comments into my theme, so I don’t really have a sense of what readers are thinking. These are minor complaints though, overall, it’s a versatile and excellent microblogging app.
Let me know if you end up tumbling down the rabbit hole…