The real origins of Tumblr
dailydot.com
dailydot.com
One of the best things about the Internet is it is a medium that encourages sharing and reinvention of ideas. Google is "just" an iteration on Altavista. Hacker News is "just" a subreddit. Twitter is "just" a .plan file. But of course that misses all the years of innovation, scaling, and polish. The way Tumblr drew inspiration from a couple of personal blogs is to be praised, not looked askance at.
That is the biggest driving force behind the project I'm working on http://microco.sm/
The limitations of the software that powers forums and communities crushes me.
I feel that communities are incredible, have so much potential, and that they have the ability to be more than the sum of their members, to create so much magic through serendipity, and when the tools communities use get in the way of this... then I feel a deep sense of loss over what should have been but isn't, the wasted potential.
It is such a profound and deep feeling, and one that resonates so much with the users of communities I've spoken to that users of forums funded our seed round, that users are supporting us as we build it, and that we felt that we had to quit our jobs and work on this... this needs to exist.
The constraints today feel like chains, and the desire to break those and free the potential is frequently overwhelming. It creates a really powerful driving force to bring this into existence and do it justice, to free the potential of a community.
The biggest difference is that within a forum, instead of just "posts in threads", a whole slew of things can exist and are properly structured... events, classifieds, galleries, polls, Q&A, wiki pages, articles, reviews.
No-one has to adapt a thread to be an event as an event type exists with time, place, attendees, etc.
Imagine the first 80% of common functionality of a meetup.com page or eventbrite page and imagine that inside a forum and that a conversation about it can also exist.
Then imagine the same for ebay adverts, magazine reviews, long-form articles, wiki-pages, surveys, etc.
And none of that stuff is global, it's not outside of the forum but on the same site, it's deep within the forums, right there beside the "posts in threads".
Instead of a community fragmenting and externalising themselves across the web, or struggling to fit everything into a threaded conversation... every tool a community needs gets surfaced within a forum... and even sub-forums.
Then imagine that instead of site admins and technical people determining which sites exist and the structure of them, that the users themselves get to define it. They can create their own sites, and their own spaces within existing sites. The simplest way to explain this today would be sub-reddits, but what if creating a whole new reddit.com was also available... so that the strength of identity of a community could be fully realised.
Basically, imagine forums that could be created in seconds, and have all of the ways in which communities and sub-communities communicate and transact dealt with in the one place.
Instead of ebay or meetup.com trying to build a community around their classifieds or events... imagine instead bringing the additional functionality that communities require and embedding it deep within the place that the community already hangout.
I feel that viewing us as competitors is to view the stagnation of discussion boards as a generalised problem. Actually the market is so vast that the problem sets we are both aiming to solve differ. I believe both approaches will be successful in much the same way that the blogging community have made both Wordpress and Tumblr successful for the different approaches to blogging. The market being so huge that even if we both have massive success (and my definition of that is huge) we will still barely have dented it.
Would Discourse work for the set of problems I feel we are attacking? No. But the market is so huge that for many people their problems are solved better by Discourse than what we're doing and vice versa. So I personally think it's great that there are more people working in this space helping to make better forums for everyone.
Perhaps in the future we'll converge on the same solution, in which case... great times, we'll both have a sparring partner and a good fight on our hands to spur us on, in the mean time my thought is that they are a partner in the fight against a plague of bad forum software.
We're currently keeping the storage layer closed though. We have an open and ongoing debate about whether to open that in future. We want to do a lot of things that improve the user experience and doing so requires an ever more complex back-end. Things like replying to email notifications putting the reply against the thing you were notified about, or providing interfaces through other protocol (events get surfaced through webcal, all content through IMAP, etc). As it's early we want to get on with building that without someone deploying the backend and freaking when we change the requirements ("you now need to add email gateways, MX records, and your infrastructure diagram now has these added boxes, etc"). When we've done most of that we'll return to whether that should be, or needs to be, open.
There is an important concept of the second/late/last mover at play. The explorer emperor is not as common as you would be forgiven for believing after taking an econ 101 class. They have fewer failures to motivate changes of course.
So humble and non-resentful of him! Very impressive, given that the other party just made a billion out of it, literally.
Woz's design was strikingly cheaper and more capable than anything else on the market and then it was successfully marketed as the first personal computer with wide consumer adoption.
In the seven years it's taken Tumblr to exit by acquisition Apple:
Developed and launched the first popular consumer personal computer.
Developed and launched the first popular consumer personal computer with a GUI.
Became highly profitable
Offered the biggest IPO in decades
It's not the same ballpark or game.
The world has smart people who invent new things and have interesting life stories and cool products (Tesla).
The world also has smart people who invent new things and have interesting life stories and cool products and make a lot of money with razor-sharp execution (Edison).
Even as folks love to lionize Tesla, it seems to me that this community is more interested in entrepreneurs than inventors.
This was a fun story to read because it did a good job conveying how everything everyone builds ultimately has a history — there are interesting cultural trends that, if you watch them, can help explain why things are the way they are today. (At least that's the theory. To be honest, knowing a fair amount about the history of TXTMob does not give me a good sense for where Twitter is going today.)