The Fashion Industry Wants Tumblr to Get its Fucking Act Together

I love Tumblr and get a lot of value from it both personally and professionally. I also regularly recommend it. (I start off with with this endorsement because I'm about to point out some opportunities for improvement that I don't want anybody to interpret as reasons not to use it. No matter what, you should probably be using it like people 2.5 years ago should have been starting to think about how they/if could use Twitter for their projects/socializing.)

On the one hand, Tumblr's lack of internal analytics (as referenced in this article) is a major weakness of almost all social networks. But on the other, users and businesses feel the pain more acutely on Tumblr than on other sites. It's a bit chicken and egg, but Tumblr is best consumed through its internal Dashboard, and many social interactions on Tumblr are invisible through any other interface. (When you see a Tumblr out on the web, it looks just like a normal website, but people "inside" the system are having a giant party you don't know about.)

Tumblr's API (very recently updated, I may be slightly behind on everything it supports) does not giving visibility to a lot of this stuff, so there's no rich ecosystem of clients like Twitter has. One can argue how well Twitter handles its developer community, but there's no denying that all the little tools out there, even if they only get "stolen" by Twitter in the end, give Twitter visibility to what users want.

Let's start with search. Twitter's original search was much worse than it is today (bad timing for me to write this, as for about a month now, Twitter search has been slightly broken). They bought Summize, who did search very well. In fact, Summize also did the first iteration of trending topics (which even if they make you worry about America, is a fascinating and incredible thing to have around).

Tumblr's personal search has been broken for about 3 years (longer?). There is pretty much no global search. (And not supported in API.)

The Twitter ecosystem also has a whole bunch of little point tools like "Where are your followers located?" and "What tags do you use the most?"

Tumblr at one point asked you what city you were in during onboarding, yet that data is nowhere to be seen, even by the account owner.

I'll stop with my examples. My point is mostly that sure, Tumblr could make an analytics dashboard. That would be great. OR, it could provide more data through the API, and I'm sure a developer community would spring up to meet many of these needs, and some we haven't even thought of.

Interestingly we just started work on a Tumblr analytics product. Will have to advertise to the fashion industry soon... :)