Tumblr Is On Fire. Now Over 6 Million Users, 1.5 Billion Pageviews A Month

The HN comments about the campaign seem to do more to further a catfight than the original blog post did in the first place.

It certainly isn't a internet startup area where there is going to be to much innovation given that to many features and you lose the people wanting a simple solution and end up competing with self hosted wordpress for more serious bloggers.

Host it yourself: wordpress.org. Have it hosted for you: wordpress.com.

For any hosted blog, I'd put it on a domain or subdomain you own so that if you do decide to move later, you control it 100%.

For more standard software typo, drupal, blogspot and wordpress are not bad (probably try them in that order). I don't know that typo or drupal have dedicated hosting, but wordpress and blogspot do.

They can quickly and easily post their thoughts to the world and get the instant feedback they need to feel heard in the form of hearts, pageviews, reblogs, photo comments, regular comments, etc. The feedback acts like a drug. All you need is a taste and you're hooked. If you don't get enough then you'll bother your friends to "please heart/comment/etc, my post". The act of asking and then receiving this drug is what keeps people interested. And that cycle never ends.

Tumblr (as much as I respect the hell out of the business they're making) is somewhat detrimental to people. I've seen it suck up peoples' lives like World of Warcraft or another game. I guess the same could be said of Facebook, MySpace, and others, though. Sorry for the harsh reality check.

* I'm a developer and not afraid to get my hands dirty but I'd rather have something self hosted because I'm not interested a potential cracking vulnerability I'd get hosting my own.*

As others have said, Wordpress.

I think if I were to itemize the features that Tumblr does really well:

1. Feedback gratification. I can't think of any other way to describe it. The 'like' function lets you get instant feedback on what you shared, whether it's original content or reblogged content. The reblog function gives you even more gratification because it means what you posted was cool enough to be reposted. Works great for attention-hungry teens (or people in general.) This can get out of control when tumblrs decide they want to flame someone, multiple reblogs that escalate in online dickery sometimes ensues.

2. Tumblr not only lets you share content, it gives you things TO share through its ability to let you 'follow' other users and 'reblog' their content/posts.

3. The tumblr timeline is like twitter on crack. Imagine an endless scroll of content. Funny stuff, serious stuff, links, images, porn, name it. The dashboard gives an very easy way to reply to a post, like a post and/or reblog it. (when I reblog a post, I make it a point to 'like' it, for example)

4. On that, tumblr's got a pretty liberal policy on nudity, pornography, etc. I'm surprised porn sites have not jumped on this yet. The Suicide Girls, for example, have a tumblr, and their content gets reblogged a lot and consistently.

5. Tumblr's also got a generally cool attitude towards its users. No condescension, and their staff have their own tumblr blogs that are snarky and pretty funny.

6. Tumblr activities. This is something they've got over just about everyone except twitter. Tumblr users create activities (one pretty fun one is 'topless tuesdays, I'll let ya'll figure that one out.) that many tumblr bloggers participate in, creating massive amounts of content.

That's just a few of the things that have made tumblr fun. I'm basically on it all day, and have it set to send my posts to twitter. Great way to find content, share content, and just dick around online.

It's a useful medium for people who are primarily curators rather than writers. Consider Dan Gruber's Daring Fireball, for example.

Some of the Services require payment of fees. Subscriber shall pay all applicable fees, as described on the Site in connection with such Services selected by Subscriber. Tumblr reserves the right to change its pricing and to institute new charges at any time, upon ten (10) days prior notice to Subscriber, which will be posted on the Site and e-mailed to Subscriber along with a link to the modified fee schedule so that you can review it. Use of the Services by Subscriber following such notification constitutes Subscriber's acceptance of any new or increased charges.

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Or, it could just be that they're making money by raising it from VCs.

At the moment, it looks like themes are the central piece in their monetization plan.

"Here's how the Internet's rage—funneled by Tumblr and 4Chan.org"

Equating the two in any light is such a lambaste of untruth it's mind boggling.

S3 for image serving.

Backend is written in PHP, IIRC.

Maybe they'll do something like they've done with the Archive view (e.g., http://staff.tumblr.com/archive) or the Mega-Editor (e.g., http://www.tumblr.com/mega-editor if you have Tumblr log).