I can’t quit you, Tumblr
In my recent redesign, I struggled with the decision of which publishing platform to run, Tumblr or Wordpress. In the end, I punted and chose to run both; Tumblr for short, life-stream posts and Wordpress for longer pieces. They both sit under the efliv.com domain, organized by tabs.
It’s clunky but, while I never felt comfortable using Tumblr as my sole platform, I also couldn’t let it go. Tumblr just has so much going for it and I think Marco and David are on to something. So here are my thoughts on what attracts me to, and bugs me about, Tumblr.
I love Tumblr’s…
- Simplicity: Posting on Tumblr is easy as pie. You simply head to the dashboard, select the post type, enter the info and presto! You have a post perfectly suited the type of media you’re blogging about. Even better, the bookmarklet allows you to post directly from the browser when you run across something you want to blog about.
- Versatility: For those comfortable with basic web design, Tumblr gives you full access to your site’s HTML and CSS. This is a big departure from other hosted solutions like Blogger. This results in incredibly beautiful and original Tumblogs.
- Social Networking: The Tumblr dashboard allows you to follow other Tumblogs and receive alerts when others start following you or reblog or like your posts. It’s a minor pain having yet another network to check, but I like it for some reason. And the iPhone app makes it easy to check on the go.
- Easy Importing: Tumblr allows you to import feeds from other services automatically. My Tumblog includes pics from flickr, links to my blog posts, and my tweets, which I’ve filtered through Yahoo! Pipes to remove duplicate flickr and blog postings (a major pet peeve of mine).
However, I couldn’t get over Tumblr’s…
- Ownership: Tumblr is a hosted solution, so they own all your content. I trust Marco and the technical team, but I just wasn’t comfortable leaving all my content on someone else’s servers with (as far as I can tell) no simple export option.
- Lack of comments: Tumblr lacks a native comment system. Sure they have the ‘answers’ feature (end any post with a ? to allow people to leave a short response) and you can always add Disqus or IntenseDebate comment systems. However, answers are pretty limited and the average user may not grok the use or advantages of third-party comment systems.
- Limited RSS output: This is a big one for me. I’m dying to get an RSS feed of only the Tumblr posts I create through the site, i.e. a feed that strips out all imported posts from my blog, flickr, and twitter. I’m a big fan of syndication and would push this feed to a number of other sites (Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.). That’s a good thing for Tumblr as it increases the “virality” of their service. However, using the current RSS feed would create numerous duplicate posts on sites where I already import those services. I’ve emailed Tumblr support and Marco directly about this. Hopefully they get the hint. As far as I know, there isn’t enough info in the current RSS feed to parse this out with Pipes. Maybe you can via the API, but I haven’t gotten that far.
- Lack of source info: This is another pain for me. With Tumblr, you can alter the appearance of your posts by type, i.e. video posts look different than text posts. However, you can not alter the appearance of a post by source. For instance, both my imported twitter messages and my reblogs and text posts fall into the “text” category. Ideally, I’d be able to differentiate the formatting of my tweets from my other text posts, adding a twitter logo for instance. This has to be on their to-do list, and I hope they add it soon.
- Direction: Tumblr clearly has big plans for the future, which are likely to include paid services and, possibly, changes to their current services. I simply don’t feel comfortable putting all my digital eggs in their undefined basket.
That about sums up my love/hate relationship with Tumblr. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments!
Image taken from: TravelByPhotos.com