Posts Tagged ‘tumblr’

Microblogging Part 2 of 4: David’s Goliath

Posted on: December 2nd, 2009 by Andy Gillette 2 Comments

As of this writing, Tumblr reports having close to 2.5 million publishers. That’s roughly 1 million for every year they’ve existed. Not bad for a company founded by a high-school dropout.

Some History

Tumblr is the brain-child of David Karp, who dropped out of high-school at 15 to pursue his web development career.  At 21, he raised $750,000 in first-round funding for his blogging platform, including an angel investment from another darling of the NY geek scene Jakob Lodwick.  According to an October 2007 article on Business Insider:

We believe but can’t confirm that this is Jakob’s first angel investment; in retrospect it shouldn’t be a shock, as he’s an avid Tumblr user. In a separate but related development, David tells us that Vimeo and Tumblr are planning a “deep integration” that will make sending Vimeo video to Tumblr sites seamless

The irony there, of course, is that Lodwick was fired from Vimeo a couple months later, but that’s neither the point, nor tremendously surprising (he’s a little bit nuts).

From there to a couple months ago when they shared some of their stats with the world, they got huge.  Really huge.  However questionable the self-reported data might be, there is certainly no doubt that they have a lot of users and, even more impressive, a really high retention rate.  They’ve thrown numbers as high as 85% of new users post on a regular basis (which is way, way, way more than, for example, twitter).

So, is it really that awesome?

It is, kind of.  I have always like using Tumblr.  There is really no barrier to entry at all, and a quick browse of random tumblogs will prove that.  In their summary of the company CrunchBase says:

There is little to no learning curve involved in using tumblr. Features are intuitive and quick to establish. Users simply sign up and begin posting in a minute.

And that’s the truth, but for as much as people love to say stuff like that, it only matters to a fraction of the audience.  I am a web designer, so it pains me to say some of this.  As intuitive and friendly as a user interface might be, all that ensures is quick uptake, and even that is mostly because people like me, who want to believe that those things really do matter, see it and say “wow, that’s so intuitive and friendly, this thing is going to be huge.”  For the kids, sadly, it’s still all about who’s who.  If you’ve ever read Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point,’ you’ll know what I’m talking about.  At the end of the day, Tumblr got so popular because it got so popular.  It became uncool to not have a tumblog.

Microblogging Part 1 of 4: The Overview

Posted on: November 19th, 2009 by Andy Gillette 2 Comments

I love my microblogs.  They’re a lot more fluid than my “real” blog (the one you’re reading), I think.  I’ve said this before, but I think they end up giving a more accurate picture of me because there’s very little forethought in them.  Jason Kottke may have gotten it right:

[microblogs are] minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.

He said that in 2005 (!) while describing what was then a new phenomenon being called “tumblelogs,” but it certainly still applies. I use my Tumblr, Twitter and Posterous accounts mainly to share the flotsam and jetsam of daily internet chatter that appeals to me (and hopefully the people who follow me).  The allure of that kind of publishing is undeniable.  It’s astonishing, really, that anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the internet can be a more prolific producer of web content than anyone would have imagined 5-10 years ago.

And now we’re at the point that microblogging is a requirement for anyone with a product or a point.  There has scarcely been a marketing plan in the past 3 years that didn’t include Twitter and Facebook (status updates qualify as a microblog).  So why all this noise?

Nav Dhami suggested an interesting answer with a decidedly neurochemical bent.  In discussing a psychological study about manic thinking, he equates Twitter with a certain kind of sustained brain activity:

My ‘Tweets’ are usually posted in relatively short bursts of activity, and I suspect this may be the case with most other microbloggers. Every time I post 8-10 Tweets in one session, the frenetic activity does leave me with a palpable dopamine surge.

To me, the explanation seems a little simpler. Narcissism. We all feel like we have something important to say, and this applies to companies too (it actually seems to be the point of marketing to turn an object into a very self-obsessed person, but that’s another discussion altogether). The desire to feel special is now just matched by the technology to do it.

I plan to focus on a few of these technologies over the next few days to try to figure out their appeal. Next up, we’ll dissect Tumblr and see if there’s a reason it became the “it” blog for slanty-haired, American Apparel wearing, angst-ridden kids around the world.