The headline may be a bit of an overstatement, but I’ve been feeling like Tumblr hits a sweet spot that I’ve been looking for for a while…blogtweetbookmarkflickrcommunity tool all rolled in one.
Tumblr, to me at least, isn’t a blog platform but something new entirely – a social network for both original and curated content that is longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature. It’s a hybrid. This nuance is lost in the news that Tumblr now has more blogs than WordPress.com. Consider this: over breakfast last week Mark Coatney from Tumblr shared with me that most of the platform’s billions of page views take place inside the dashboard rather than on the individual domains. That means that Tumblr is less like WordPress and more like Twitter or Facebook – a social network for content rather than a blogging platform. A huge part of Tumblr’s appeal is its community. Like Twitter and Facebook you don’t have to attract an audience, you just need to get them to subscribe. And while RSS is baked in, subscriptions are disguised simply as follows on Tumblr, making it all the more simple.