I don’t use it myself, but I do read it, and those whom I do read are freaking a little about it. Mostly, they’re worried about two major issues: Yahoo “integrating” their services, including advertising, into Tumblr; and Yahoo possible transferring their “no sexually explicit content” policy onto Tumblr (if you haven’t been there, there’s a LOT of porn and explicit fanfiction there).
Tumblr’s users seem to feel that theirs is a space that has a lot of qualities and such that aren’t found in places like Facebook. How do you think such a purchase would affect those?
If it’s anything like Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr, not much will happen ever. They won’t impose much on it, but the service will just be frozen as it was at the time of acquisition, gradually getting more and more dated as other services surpass it. Yahoo’s just a big wad of inertia.
To be fair, Flickr has made some substantial improvements in the last year or so, with some mobile updates quite recently. They’re still on the back foot but appear to be attempting to turn things around.
I don’t think anything good will come of it. I don’t see how Yahool can leave Tumblr the way it is now. It isn’t like Tumblr is bringing in a lot of money so that means a lot of changes will be had (and I can’t really why they wouldn’t have paying 1.1 billion dollars).
I wonder what will happen to all the pro-anna, porn, slash, cutting, etc blogs on there.
Part of Tumblr’s appeal is how clean it is, ie not much advertising. Start ramping up the ads and people will leave it in droves probably. I dunno how in hell they think it’s worth over $1 billion. It reminds me of AOL’s purchase of Bebo for over $800,000,000. That was an unmitigated disaster although at the time Bebo was losing users in droves to Facebook and Tumblr doesn’t appear to have peaked yet.
I don’t even “get” Tumblr*. It seems very circular, with no real point to it. Pinterest I get. Flickr I get. Blogger I get. But Tumblr seems to be less useful than any of those, and is frustrating to use.
*Add it to the ever-increasing list of Internet trends I don’t get
Shockingly, there can be more than one variation of something. Tumblr and Instagram are very similar, except I’d say the interface of Tumblr allows for more text-based posting in addition to the majority-visual posts. Personally, I vastly prefer the interface of Tumblr to Instagram.
Tumblr is a multifaceted thing. It can handle pretty much all of those other social networking functions. It basically is what MySpace was, with all the customization and freedom that entailed.
Setting up a Tumblr page is pretty much like setting up a lite webpage.
As far as tech goes, tumblr isn’t exactly unique. The difference is in the userbase. I find it hard to nail down, though. What I find in tumblr is very much a collection of my own tastes, but that is because there’s so much variety of what can be found.
I think that what tumblr is really good at building is cohesion. Fandoms, feminists, atheists, human rights folks and such cluster together, support and sustain eachother.
The main draws of tumblr are the lack of ads and the freedom to post and find nearly anything you’d damn well want. (Yes, that includes porn). Once that goes, users will find something new.
Tumblr is blog making software, easy as that. What made it valuable to Yahoo is its user base is extremely young and tech savvy and they want to drive that audience to Yahoo. Even with that in mind it seems they paid an awful lot of money.
My guess is the biggest change to Tumblr will be all the porn and copyrighted stuff on it will be gone which will drive away much of the audience Yahoo was aiming to get.
You don’t have to get social media. Yahoo just bought a web site with enough monthly visitors to grow their audience by roughly 50%. Evidently they figure that’s worth about a billion dollars in the long term.
Yahoo is a puzzle. Google is getting ready to launch a subscription music service, with Apple possibly to follow. Rhapsody, MOG, Spotify, and Slacker are already in service, and I’m sure there are others.
Eight years ago, Yahoo was there also. I had a subscription to both Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited, and the Yahoo service was great. So what did Yahoo do? Shut it down.
I guess it could have been worse. They could have bought Rhapsody and then shut it down. That’s a dick move, and it takes acompany like Apple to do that to a service (or of course, HP with Palm).