Tumblr, the incredibly popular microblogging platform, is doing very well. The company announced that they now reach over 120 Million people every single month through their nearly 42 Million blogs and 16 Billion+ posts.

The site makes it very easy to post content or get a message out there. Users have built-in options to easily share an image, text, video, and so on. Add to the fact that you can use a bookmarklet to share anything interesting that you’ve came across, and you’ve got a winner.

While most people look at the blogging platform as a place for teens, it’s actually a lot more than that and has quite the adult audience. Also, many businesses and top brands use the platform to get content quickly out there.

Via VentureBeat:

“Tumblr’s quirky blogging platform and community network reaches 120 million people every month, founder and CEO David Karp disclosed at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Monday. Karp, citing the startup’s latest Quantcast figures, shared that the social network and blogging hybrid now sees 15 billion page views each month.”

CEO David Karp on their growth:

“The early growth that we saw was around creators … our first community was those creators,” Karp said of Tumblr’s initial growth spurt. “We didn’t set out to build network .. all we wanted to do was make novel tools.” But in building explicitly for creators, a widespread network of creators, curators and content consumers was born.”

Do you have a Tumblr account and if so, how often do you use and post?

Tumblr Reaches 15 Billion Pageviews, 120 Million People Every Month is a post from: The Inquisitr

That awkward moment when you totally relate to a joke and everyone on Tumblr knows it.

Sex and Blogging is a post from: The Inquisitr

This guy. He proposed to his girlfriend using pretty much only memes. Would you marry him?

Man Proposes to Girlfriend Entirely in Internet Memes [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Blog provider Tumblr already has more than 32 million users and on Monday they added a big name to those users, President Barack Obama.

The Barack Obama presidential campaign has launched their new Tumblr page in an attempt to attract younger voters to their 2012 re-election campaign, the same type of social media awareness that the President used during his first Presidential election in 2008.

The move to grab Tumblr’s core audience is the campaign’s attempt at sharing the entire process with users, on their first Tumblr blog the Obama campaign writes:

“We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort — a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.”

The post goes on to note:

You can send us a few paragraphs about how your latest phonebanking gig went or why you’re in for 2012. Share the latest chart you saw that made you go “woah.” Ask a question. Upload a photo of 2012 t-shirts or signs you see out in the wild. Pass along jokes, particularly if they’re funny. And if you’re among the Tumbl-inclined, send us posts you’ve published on your own Tumblr that we should look at re-blogging.

The campaign has also been proactive from the start in talking about the potential for trolling, a real possibility for most blogs, they state in their post:

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people — fairly nice ones — and that your mother would want you to be polite.

Obviously trolls could care less about the feelings of website owners but it’s still nice to see Obama and his campaign realizing the importance of digital media once again during their campaigning.

Are you planning to follow the Barack Obama campaign via Tumblr?

Tumblr Campaign Gets A New User, President Obama is a post from: The Inquisitr

The social news aspect of Facebook makes for lots of interesting political and social conversations on a variety of subjects- abortion, circumcision, tipping at restaurants…

However, users of the site are constantly and inadvertently getting punked by satire newspaper The Onion. While The Onion predates the web, it used to be a bit easier for armchair pundits to identify the satirical paper in context. When not clearly placed beside other obviously satirical articles, sometimes confirmation bias steps in and people sound off on the fake news.

Individually, these reactions have floated around the internet for some time, to much derision. (Most surreptitious sharers blank out identifying details to protect the dopey.) But a new Tumblr has gathered all these outraged outpourings of misdirected bile in one handy place. Literally Unbelievable is a very apt name for the reactions to these articles, the most common of which currently is The Onion‘s ‘Abortionplex’ piece.

Have you ever encountered one of these convos in the wild?

‘Literally Unbelievable’ is The Onion Plus Facebook Equals Hilarity is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yes. This is only acceptable when I do it.

Insanity Wolf on linking social media accounts to other social media accounts is a post from: The Inquisitr

After a roughly day-long outage, popular microblogging service Tumblr has returned with a sheepish apology and an assertion that an outage like yesterday/today’s is totally not okay, you guys.

Tumblr reassured fans on their Twitter account that the service was almost back up and running again, and proceeded to go silent for nine hours- equivalent to about 10 weeks in internet time. Tumblr users wept, prayed and gnashed their teeth on Twitter during the outage, and the service finally came back up early this evening.

On their blog, Tumblr says:

Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.

Tumblr reassures us that the outage is not something they consider cool as par for the course:

While you might feel like you’ve gotten used to seeing errors on Tumblr recently, know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression.

Even adding:

Sorry we let you down today.

While the outage was inconvenient and threw a wrench in my daily browsing habits, for a totally free, gorgeously presented service, worse things could happen. Some bloggers have expressed diminished faith in Tumblr, but I’d hazard a guess that the outage isn’t indicative of ongoing problems with the service.

Regarding the Tumblr outage, u mad tho?

[Image]

Tumblr back up, finally! is a post from: The Inquisitr

What Tumblr actually meant when they said:

“This has been a slow and painful recovery, but we’re almost through. We’ll have more info to share as soon as we can post to our blog again.”

Tumblr still down, 14 hours and ticking… is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’ve been trying to update your Tumblr fruitlessly for the past half a day, you’re not alone- the multimedia microblogging service is still down due to a lengthy and mostly-unexplained outage.

The outage began well over twelve hours ago, at which time Tumblr’s twitter was updated with the following message:

We’re working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We’re incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.

And then, tumbleweed and silence. There has been no update on when the service (which runs several widely-read blogs such as TheDailyWh.at) might return, but Twitter has become the crazy girlfriend of Tumblr, with panicked users speculating on whether the service will down forever. (No source for such a postulation was cited, and there is no evidence that Tumblr is not coming back.)

In the absence of a given reason for the very large outage, we can only sit back, wait and agree with Y U NO guy on Twitter, who said:

TUMBLR SAYS WE’LL BE BACK SHORTLY. DAVID KARP, Y U NO SEE ITS BEEN OVER AN HOUR

Edit: Also, there is When Tumblr is Down.

Tumblr is still down, everyone can officially panic is a post from: The Inquisitr

Gowalla announced an upgrade to their service today, integrating the app with its two biggest competitors.

Also on the docket is integration with Twitter and Tumblr, but Gowalla 3 is only available for iPhone until January. (iPad, Blackberry and Android integration is expected to follow then.) In a post on their blog describing how “stoked” they are about the new features, Gowalla says:

In fact, we’ve made checking in at your favorite places even easier with a new, faster check-in interface. We debated calling this “quick” or “express” check in, but it doesn’t really need a gimmicky name. We just made it better. Simply tap the Check In button that is universally present in the tab bar and based on your previous history and current location, we’ll auto-fill where we think you are. We get it right about 80 percent of the time. In the cases where our best guess was a little off, it’s super easy to select the correct location with a couple quick taps. Then you can quickly and easily share where you are with your friends on Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr… We’ve combined them all into a single, connected activity feed with all your friends, regardless of the service they checked in on.

The post also discusses “Highlights,” which are now “baked into” Gowalla’s Spots. Highlights will, according to Gowalla’s posts, also allow users to read Foursquare tips at the very same location. Another updated feature is “Bookmarks,” allowing you to save places you wish to visit in the future and access them later.

One feature that sounds pretty cool is the “Notes” functionality, enabling users to leave messages for friends set to open on their next check-in at a spot. The upgrade is available now on iTunes- do the new features give you more reason to use the service, or are you married to Facebook Places or Foursquare?

[Gowalla Blog]

Gowalla hooks up with Foursquare, Facebook Places is a post from: The Inquisitr

Do people even have those anymore? If so, they kind of deserve it.

[via Digg]

Trolling hipsters IRL is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Yahoo buying Tumblr…or maybe not is a post from: The Inquisitr

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 takes $4.5 million. Recession? What Recession! is a post from: The Inquisitr

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)

Posty: All-in-one AIR App for Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Friendfeed is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Y Combinator startup is all about ease of use. To use, send your post to post@posterous.com. 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 post@posterous.com so you can marvel, at least briefly, in the pure simplicity the folks behind this have come up with.

Posterous: even simpler than Tumblr is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Swurl Is Content Aggregation Meets Tumblr is a post from: The Inquisitr