2011-01-06
Why Use Tumblr?
Last month, I spent a few minutes with a colleague who didn’t understand what the attraction of Tumblr was. Later on, I posted an answer to a question on Quora, “If you have a blog and use Twitter why use Posterous and/or Tumblr too?” That answer more or less summarises the appeal, so here it is, crossposted out to something I have slightly more control of, and slightly edited based on some friend’s suggestions.
I have an old MT blog, a Twitter account, and a Tumblr. The former hasn’t had a post since January, whereas my Tumblr has about 60 posts a month. (Twitter is probably more like 300.) So, why use Tumblr not the blog, or Twitter? I’d say the three factors are posting UI, the dashboard, and the bookmarklet.
Firstly, the post editing screens are specialised per post type, and they’re all pretty simple to use. Photos don’t have a title, for example, reducing the amount of work I need to do if I want to quickly share an image. (Compare that to MT or Wordpress asking for a title, excerpt, entry, extended entry, tags, categories, slug…) Personally I do spend the time to add a bunch of metadata (notably tags), but they’re less obvious and less onerous. Of course, unlike Twitter, posts don’t have a length limit (so you can say what you need to).
Secondly, the dashboard is great. Like the Twitter home page, it’s a list of posts from people you’re following, and as such it’s a pretty nifty tool for discovering things. However, Unlike Twitter, it had a sensible quoting/reposting tool built in from the very early days. Reblogging is different from retweeting: like “folk” retweeting you can edit and expand (or argue with) a point, but like “official” retweeting, it preserves metadata about who posted the original. The upshot is, you’ll see stuff your friends post, and if it’s something you’d like to share, it’s very easy. If they post something you want to argue with, that’s easy too. You can build long conversations on Tumblr, and unlike on Twitter they’re easy to link to and follow (although they’re still reverse-chronological, unfortunately).
Thirdly, Tumblr offer a JavaScript bookmarklet that makes pulling in photos and quotes from the web pretty straightforward. As a result, a lot of Tumblr accounts don’t really have much new content, but on the other hand, it does mean it’s a busy site, and anyway, curation can be as revealing about a person as what they create directly.
In summary: it’s easy to share things, either of your own, replying to your friends, or from the web, and without character limits.
