I've been online since the creation of the Internet. It started with pine-based email, playing games on CompuServe (and being blown away by the amount of time people must put into those games to get the top scores), and playing card games in the early days. Then it was chat rooms, Napster, Amazon, and CDnow (not in that order though, I guess. Google came along and made everything easy to find. Nothing could really capture my attention though and keep me coming back on a daily basis, and the Internet was mostly a distraction.
Two things happened. First was Facebook/social networks, which somehow made active participation online not just for the uber-geeks. The next was discovering Google Reader. The idea that I could automatically pull (and manage) a ton of interesting content into one place and read through it like email introduced me to the blog world. Now I have hundreds of sites I track on a daily basis - millions if you count by RSS-ized alerts.
As a result, I've somehow found myself participating in dozens of places online. There's a snipper on the right showing those I can think of. Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn (I promise this isn't link bait, I'm just making a point), Zecco of course, Serious Eats, Flickr, Last.fm, Yelp!... There's too many to keep track of - not only for me, but for others as well. Of course, that's only given the assumption that anyone would want to follow me to all these different places.
That's where Tumblr comes in - it's like Google Reader meets Facebook. All my participation, commentary, even blogging, gets pulled into one place that I can control. (Well, currently only 5 points of participation, but who's counting? I'm sure that will increase.) People who are really interested in me as a person can follow that. People interested in me as an eater, or as an investor, can follow me on those places, or simply let my contributions get summed up into the aggregate.
Why I'm excited:
- People can follow my Diggs, Delicious saves, Twitters, and blog posts from one page. They don't have to go to lots of different sites or services.
- I have full control over what's displayed. There are predefined types of posts, like links, photos, videos, quotes, even conversations, and I can decided how each of them appears.
- I interact with other people using Tumblr. Reblogging posts & following people is very easy on the dashboard - for now. I could see some scale issue here in following much more than 5 active people.
- I can see them building better, more direct, and faster API integration with more services. Upadates will become quicker. And each "post" could potentially have an icon indicating its source. All version x.0 sorts of things, I'm sure.
Other people agreeing:
(p.s. I'm glad they don't allow comments. That's not the point. Comments are for blogs).
1 comment:
Good post, and a good reminder about the conversation we had about this the other day. Will be aspiring to get my Tumblr in order ASAP - sounds a lot easier than trying to aggregate these things into a blog [which had been my plan previously]
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