Meet Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival | Hacker News Reader

Meet Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival

dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

37 pointsdonohoe17 comments

I feel a mild uneasiness in the force, as if millions of people discovered blogging via a great new interface, then gradually got bored with or forgot about it just as they did the first time they tried it 8 years ago.

The reason most people stop blogging is because no one is reading what they write. So they don't get any feedback, they aren't part of the conversation, their writing doesn't get better over time, etc. Tumblr solves this problem. It's essentially like taking the best of Kuro5hin (c. 2005) and Typepad, without the major problems inherent in both of those communities. It's not just a new blog platform, it's a completely different form of communication.

A dash after tumblr would have been much more informative than a comma.

Or an apostrophe after "Facebook," I think.

I was expecting the article to reveal a new service that is competing against Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. I suppose that says something about Tumblr -- at least in my eyes it's pretty well established.

Read it the exact same way.

Surely a semi-colon wouldn't have hurt, but I think most people are scared of using one nowadays.

Actually, a colon (:) would have been the correct punctuation mark to use.

The headline should have been: Meet Tumblr: Facebook and Twitter's New Rival

Yes, or: "Meet Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival: Tumblr".

But, maybe the headline-writer was intentionally vague. People who already know about Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter might be more likely to click if they thought the article was about a new fourth company, competing with all of them.

In the old world, where you'd already bought a magazine or newspaper, the incentives of headline-writers and readers were more aligned. Sure, the headline should be interesting --- but also accurate in a way that saved the customer's time. Only the front-covers as shown on newsstands -- before the purchase decision -- needed spin to steal attention.

Now, every single click is a sort of 'purchase decision', and every headline subject to the perverse incentives of the newsstand, where the reader's time is something to be stolen. Sometimes confusing people gets more traffic than informing them -- so we get intentionally misleading or inflammatory headlines.

Anyone want to collaborate on a web service that re-headlines links to curb attention-grabbing abuse?

Since Tumblr is currying favor among a young crowd, it could prove valuable for traditional companies and media outlets that are trying to build a relationship with that audience.

This terrifies me. I'd consider myself a tumblr veteran, having built a number of themes and using the service loyally for quite some time-I don't think they'd "sell out", but the idea of all these large companies invading the space, just to say they have a presence in social media, and to push up on me and my friends so they can be "close to our generation" bugs me, it almost cheapens the entire experience.

All I can say is: thank god that this article isn't about diaspora and NYT's childlike wonder at those talented young kids.

Congratulations, you win the Most Misleading Headline of the Day prize!

My thoughts exactly.

"Mr. Coatney estimated that posting links and notes to the Newsweek Twitter feed and Facebook page sent roughly 200,000 to 300,000 readers to Newsweek’s Web site each month. By comparison, Tumblr sent closer to 1,000 a day."

Ugh -- why didn't the author make the time periods symmetrical. This was almost as painful as the confusing title, for me.

I'm curious why people link to a summary of an article that actually resides elsewhere--a similar example was just submitted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568011.

In both cases the summary bore a headline which significantly altered one's initial understanding of the article at hand, and in both cases it led to a more difficult and/or unrewarding read.

So it sounds like every time there is a decent-sized online community, media feels the need to plant somebody to repost content and engage in conversations?

Is this only done for Twitter and Facebook (and now Tumblr), or does this also apply to Orkut, Netlog, Bebo, MySpace, etc?

And is this only applicable to social networks that are extremely communication oriented (vs. profile or media oriented)?

Wonder if any of the thousands of people who created Tumblr accounts today (and likely imported contacts from their mail services) noticed the blatant lack of encrypted data transfer? Ref: http://mccammon.org/keith/2010/08/02/tumblr-sharing-your-pas...

I don't feel like it's fair to say tumblr is a competitor to Facebook. It's not the same at all. I use both and I don't think they overlap that much.

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