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Tumblr Is To Blogging What Sprinkles Are To Sundaes (Or Why Tumblr Rocks)
I’m sure that by now a number of you have heard of Tumblr, the up and coming tumblelog service created by the “smallish” web-development company Davidville. I first discovered Davidville, which is located in New York City, on CSS Mania. I didn’t pay too much attention to some of their work at the time, but I must say that Tumblr has my full attention.
In the words of Tumblr, tumblelogs are to scrapbooks what blogs are to journals. They are an extremely user-friendly way to rapidly deploy photos, quotes, links, conversation snippets, videos, and even regular blog-like posts.
Admittedly, my first reaction to hearing about Tumblr was something along the lines of, “Not another blogging company!” But after giving Tumblr a spin and setting up my own tumblelog in less time than it takes to sneeze, I can say with confidence that the Tumblr experience is absolutely nothing like the traditional blogging experience.
Tumblr v. Blogging
Before I go any further, I want to make a clear note that attempting to compare a service like Tumblr to a traditional blogging service like say, WordPress, would be moot.
Whereas blogs enable large repositories of useful content to be stored and shared, tumblelogs seem at first glance to be a minimalist’s approach to sharing one’s stream of consciousness.
Tumblelogs are the mallet while blogs are the jackhammer. Tumblr recognized this and created a service that traditional blogging platforms had previously not been able to effectively integrate into their systems. Heck, even the official Tumblr blog is run by WordPress, and for good reason. Tumblr is not a blogging platform, per se, so I won’t be treating it like one.
The Back End
You can post regular posts, photos, quotes, links, conversation snippets, and videos on Tumblr. Each element has its own method of posting, and they all take under a minute to go from typing to publishing.
Regular Post
In the Regular Post section, the only two fields that are editable are a Title field and and Body Field. There are no categories to manage or timestamps to worry about. Permalinks are automatically generated so pretty URLs are a no go.
Trackbacks and comments do not exist on Tumblr posts, so if you’re looking to foster a sense of community on a tumblelog, you need to stick with a traditional blogging platform. As I said before, Tumblr resembles a virtual scrapbook, so only having the Title and Body field for a Regular Post is just fine.
Photo
By clicking on the Photo pallet, you are taken to a very simple page that has an upload button (or you can use a remote URL if you like) and a caption field. It takes literally seconds to locate a local file, give it a caption, and then upload it. As it stands now, I don’t see any way to modify the dimensions of an uploaded file.
Quote
The quote section is by far my favorite section on Tumblr. The appearance of quotes are completely customizable, as is everything else, and all that you have to do is type in your quote and its source, and click “Create post”. Again, the entire process takes seconds.
Links, Conversation, and Video
In addition to regular posts, photos, and quotes, Tumblr also offers a simple link creator, conversation snippet generator, and video sharing area. Of these three features I was most impressed with the Video section, as it allows you to post both URL’s and raw embed tags from any video/flash website. The process is painless, painfully simple, and most importantly, super quick.
Tumblr Woos Designers And Developers
I believe that where Tumblr will succeed with the masses is in its simplicity. But where Tumblr will succeed with designers and front-end developers is in its customization area.
Tumblr comes with five tumblelog templates but allows users to completely modify the display of their Tumblr account by editing the XHTML/CSS code of the tumblelog.
What this means for front-end developers like me is that we can use the Tumblr architecture to create super simple websites for potential clients who are looking for a way to easily manage their online scrapbooks. Through the use of Tumblr template tags and customized CSS/XHTML, a fully functional, uniquely branded tumblelog can be created with a Tumblr account. Badass, I know.
And I didn’t even bring up the API.
Why Tumblr Will Kill The Competition
Simple. Because there is none. As I already stated, tumblelogs and blogs are like apples and oranges. Davidville saw the need for a platform like Tumblr and hopped on the idea. It will succeed because it takes very little time to go from typing to publishing.
End users want quick platforms that don’t have bells and whistles that they don’t need, and there are a great number of web users who just don’t need the additional functionality in traditional blogging platforms like WordPress.
In short, Tumblr succeeded in making the porridge just right, and I’ve got a feeling that they are about to take off into orbit really soon.
(Visit my Tumblr page!)
Post Date: March 22, 2007
3 Responses to “Tumblr Is To Blogging What Sprinkles Are To Sundaes (Or Why Tumblr Rocks)”
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April 17th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
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SeoVibe:
August 19th, 2007 at 1:56 am
I haven’t used tumblr yet but am tempted now, great article.
Dan Buell:
December 9th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Tumblr is very buggy. Date stamping does not work which really kills the experience. I agree, great potential!
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