Why Tumblr is Cool
Social networking and social media are exploding. Facebook is on the verge of surpassing MySpace in its user base, and Twitter seems to be the next best thing to sliced bread. In the midst of these newer social medium there's still blogging and let's not forget the world of social bookmarking or social photo sharing. The problem now is that there are just too many networks, too many options to socialize on.
I've never been into MySpace. I signed up for Facebook back in College and for the longest time worked hard to post as infrequently as possible my status. When Twitter started to emerge with promise I avoided it too, and then eventually I fell in love Twitter. I enjoy Twitter so much I decided I would cross-post my tweets to Facebook, which meant in turn that I became an active Facebook user too. At the birth of blogdom I was busy writing my own blogging software tackling concepts before Wordpress was even common coinage on the net, however as of late my blogging has become scarce. I've got a delicious account now that I use to track articles and things I read, and I think that's kind of a novel service too.
The problem is my twitter, facebook, delicious and blog accounts are all on different mediums. If I ever get into the photo or video thing (which I'm liable to do once the baby is born) I can add at least two more medium services to the mix. If anyone wanted to follow my activity on these things they'd need to know my usernames, sign up for those services and jump into the social mix. What if they didn't want to? Or, what if someone like my in-laws wanted to see what I was up to with their limited social-medium experience?
This is where I think Tumblr is cool. I've just started playing around with the tumblelog and have it mashing up some of my social medium into one locale. Mashups are nothing new, but I think a service like Tumblr is a better twist on mashups then we've seen so far. Mashups have up until now manifested themselves in javascript and thus suffered from rate limit restrictions from services like Twitter. They've also been dependent upon the services to run well, and so if service A is slow then all of your mashup is slow too. Plus, there's been no archive of the mashup and most of these services only spit out a certain amount of data at a given time.
One think I feel Tumblr is lacking is connection to the services it streams in. Once something has been posted to your tumblelog it seems disconnected from where it originated. That said the principal of Tumblr is what intrigues me. All this social media stuff is great, but there still needs to be a way of delivering holistically someone's social-stuff into a centralized location. No, I'm not talking about another service either. There's a WordPress plugin that seems to fit the bill, LifeStream. I've been doing my own thing for way too long to start using WordPress now. I like simplicity too, and LifeStream has more options than I can get my head around, to say nothing of code which has several thousand lines per file... just too messy for my likes.
If you're doing the whole social-media thing and haven't yet looked at Tumblr, I'll plug it now. If you are a WordPress user, I'll plug LifeStream. If you're like me, a developer who just likes to do his own thing, then I'd suggest developing yourself a portal for mashing your stuff together. Be creative about it too!
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