What I love and hate about tumblr
The move of this blog over to tumblr was pretty impressive. A slick XML API made it simple to import all my old posts over. The lack of comments made me finally go take a harder look at integrating disqus, which I’m thankful for. The whole idea of disqus rocks. The public designs are trendy, and the templating system allows for complete control over the style. And something that at first can seem silly is actually brilliant: the way that they discern between different types of posts (text, quotes, links, audio w/ caption, and video w/ caption) will help semantic search engines make better sense of what they are looking at down the road.
Now about that stuff that I hate:
That’s me, writing this post in TextEdit, because tumblr.com won’t load. We’re talking minute response times. This is something I’ve noticed over the past 3 days. At times the site is completely unresponsive. Maybe their usage patterns are unique and 9:42pm EST on Mondays is the busiest time of the week for them, or maybe they’ve been doing a series of upgrades over the last few days. Who knows? But at the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth I’ll just point out that:
Tumblr is not Twitter. Twitter got a lot of shit for their performance last year, but they deserve some leeway. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when September’s numbers come out in a few weeks, and Tumblr will have posted 100% growth this month. It’s sure awesome enough to warrant that, but this kind of performance is really a buzz kill. I hope they get a handle on things, because I cannot wait to start using this more. I’d even pay if that’s what it took (hint, hint, tumblr).
