thememegeneration: Waaah, someone’s using a social service in a social manner, waaah!
See, that’s kinda my point: when did Tumblr’s priorities shift from making great blogging features to making arguably-great social media features?
Don’t get me wrong - the spicy melange of social media and blogging features is exactly what makes Tumblr the sultry minx that she currently is. But at some point the focus has shifted from making blogging better to making socialising easier. And I’m not sure, given how inundated we are with social media services already, that this is a good idea.
They could’ve enabled a tasteful, discrete comments feature (it’s been a feature request for long enough) - something inline but visible within a post in the dashboard. Or updated some of the customisation / theme options (remember that website thing your Tumblr creates? The one that, thanks to a thousand indented reblogs and themes that don’t support the ask feature, looks like shit?). But they didn’t. Instead they chose to scalp, wholesale, the formspring idea, because a thousand tweens clamoring for attention can’t be wrong, right?
Who knows - perhaps the next feature they roll out will even up the difficult blogging/social media balance they’re aiming for and that makes Tumblr such a great idea. But for the moment Tumblr has shifted toward the social media side, and it really makes me miss the days when I could describe it as “Deli.cio.us bookmarking that outputs directly into a blog.”
