The Inquisitr » tumblr

Yahoo buying Tumblr…or maybe not

Duncan Riley — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:40:40 +0000

Valleywag reports that Yahoo is in negotiations to by cut down blogging service Tumblr.

According to Owen Thomas, the talks are being led by Yahoo’s Tapan Bhat and the asking price is low to mid eight figures.

AllThingsD though reports a flat out denial from Tumblr.

Although the price might be a little high, the service would be a good fit for Yahoo. Yahoo has lacked in social networking and blogging like services since announcing the closure of the poorly performing Yahoo 360, and it’s a gaping hole that could do with filling. Tumblr also appeals to Yahoo’s younger demographic, and would fit in nicely alongside services such as Flickr and Delicious.

Still, it would be surprising to see Yahoo spending at a time it’s making sweeping cuts and closing services.

Tumblr takes $4.5 million. Recession? What Recession!

Duncan Riley — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:50:38 +0000

Blogging service Tumblr has raised 4.5 million Series B in a round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

Tumblr plans to use the money to introduce paid “Plus” accounts for users among other things. Currently Tumblr doesn’t generate any revenue at all.

Tumblr has a strong loyal user base and it’s a great service, but like Twitter it has made zero attempt to generate revenue so far. Why you’d need $4.5 million to introduce a paid level of service is beyond me, and so much for the recession. $4.5 million into a company with no revenue shows that the bubble hasn’t completely burst yet.

Silicon Alley Insider has more.

Tumblr

Posty: All-in-one AIR App for Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Friendfeed

Duncan Riley — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:36:52 +0000

Posty is an Adobe AIR application that supports interaction with Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Friendfeed.

Posty delivers content for each via a separate tab for each service. Customization features are basic, allowing users to change the color of fonts, but nothing else. Posty users can post to one, all, or a combination of each service through the one screen, allowing for easy cross posting to the supported platforms.

As more and more competing services come out, the ability to track and participate in each one, particularly at a time where Twitter users are scattering all over the place, becomes harder. Posty goes some way in delivering an easy to use, one stop frontend for multiple services.

Why I don’t like it: the screen shot above is Posty’s actual size. 550px wide. Fat as fat can be for a service that should be complimentary on your screen, not take up a large chunk of monitor space. It also lacks friend content for Pownce and Jaiku, making it a waste of time for both. However, it is a step in the right direction, the app is still fairly young, and it would be fair to presume that some of these issues will be addressed with later releases. If you can handle the size, it’s worth a look.

(via Sarah in Tampa)

Posterous: even simpler than Tumblr

Duncan Riley — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:52:52 +0000

Posterous is a Tumblr style microblogging platform that defines itself through a perhaps unlikely angle: strong support for email posting.

The Y Combinator startup is all about ease of use. To use, send your post to . That’s it, and you can include files, pictures, audio, video and text. Just remember to crop your email signature prior to sending otherwise that gets published as well. You don’t have to register either to start posting, the service generates an automatic URL for you based on your email address. If you want a custom URL, or want to edit your post, you do have to register, but the only two things you have to fill in are email address and password (and password only once).

Michele Martin at Bamboo Project notes that you could use a Posterous blog for a one-sentence professional journal, to share conference sessions as they happen, to send photos or video of an off-site event or problem or to “use it as your back-up brain.”

Off the bat it’s an appealing, well thought out service, that is insanely simple to use. Many might argue that email is dead (and it is for younger people) but this is so easy my mother could use it without any instructions. The flip side: crowded space, established players. I’ve started using Utterz and Tumblr recently to deliver some similar to what Posterous does, although Posterous doesn’t do phone call recording unfortunately.

I know I’m often happy to recommend sites for people to check out, but check this one out by sending an email to so you can marvel, at least briefly, in the pure simplicity the folks behind this have come up with.

Swurl Is Content Aggregation Meets Tumblr

Duncan Riley — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:07:23 +0000

New comer to the blogging 2.0 space Swurl aggregates online activity to deliver a Tumblr like experience with a unique timeline view as well.

The Swurl platform automatically brings a user’s web life together into a rich Tumblr-like format, with a focus on blogging as opposed to rss feeds. Standout features include enriched content, with bookmarked Pandora songs found and linked to on Seeqpod and full songs are posted + lyrics from LyricWiki, infinite scrolling, Open API (all content created on Swurl can be exported) and XFN microformat support.

Perhaps the best feature is the timeline view, that presents all your content in a visual time line. It’s nifty and rather appealing. Friend content is only presented blog style reverse chronologically, but a friends gallery like this would also have appeal. And a note for FriendFeed users, you can import your FriendFeed followers into Swurl as well, although naturally you don’t get the same FriendFeed style interaction.

The thing that rings alarm bells for me: Swurl promotes full reposting of content as a key selling point. It may provide some advantages in providing a seamless experience for the end user, but imagine this page from my Swurl stream with the full post publicly provided with the ability for people to comment on the content there and even Digg it. Did someone say Google duplicate content penalty? And then there’s the basically giving Swurl permission to reprint all your content on their own site for nothing in return…permission splogging perhaps?

Overall Swurl reminds me of Tumblr, and it comes with CName support so custom domains can be used. It hits the yet another aggregation service button for me, but I can see other people using this service, particularly users of services such as Tumblr. It’s simple, clean, functional, and occasionally appealing.