Tumblr

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website owned by Tumblr, Inc. Tumblr users are allowed to post and share various content on their short-form blog, follow other users' blogs, and create private blogs. The site runs using a dashboard interface such that users can access the majority of Tumblr's features and other blogs from one location.

Tumblr was founded in February of 2007 and is stationed in New York City. As of October 3, 2012, Tumblr has since grown to host 75.9 million blogs and is globally rated at rank 37, and rank 20 in the United states, in terms of user traffic.

History

At 19, David Karp[13], the founder and CEO of Tumblr, caught on to a new trend in short-form blog posts, or "tumblelogs." After seeing no platform devoted to such blogs, Karp started working on one himself. Karp had begun programming at 11 after reading "HTML for Dummies" and at 15, dropped out of high school to pursue running his first company, Davidville, which would later change names to Tumblr, Inc.

After beginning work on Tumblr in late 2006, in November of 2007, Tumblr was officially launched with an employee base of just David Karp and one other programmer, Marco Arment.

Two weeks after Tumblr's launch, it had a user base of 75,000. In 2009, Tumblr, Inc. acquired Tumblerette, an application in the Apple Inc App Store, after which Tumblr launched its official app for the iPhone. In 2012, Tumblr began moving towards paid advertising and featured their first brand advertising campaign with Adidas.

As of October 6, 2012, Tumblr has over 76.3 million blogs and more than 33 billion blog posts. The company has grown to 103 employees up from its original two, though Marco Arment had previously left in 2010 to focus on Instapaper. In early 2012, Tumblr had sported a growth of 15 billion monthly pageviews and 120 million monthly unique visitors, a 900% platform growth since the year before. 40 to 45% of Tumblr's current users are located in the U.S and 2% of its overall users are responsible for 43% of its visits. Tumblr is currently available in eight different languages.

Features

Post Formats

Because Tumblr is a microblogging site, it offers a variety of templates for different mediums of posting that embody the core of its dashboard. The templates it offers assist in blogging text, photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts, audio, and videos. These templates have some flexibility in that you can include an image onto a text template and plain text on most of the other templates. On posting something to a blog, Tumblr also gives an option to tag that post to various topics or categories so that other users who search for those tags may find it.

Blog Options

Tumblr gives various options in setting up one's blog. One can allow for multiple authors as well as write multiple unique blogs on a single account. A blog can be password protected so as to keep it private or share with a select group of readers. There are also several ways to customize a blog through selecting between various Tumblr provided themes. Furthermore, one can customize the HTML of a theme or make one from scratch. It is also possible to make one's created theme available to other users, either for free or to buy.

User Interaction

There are several "tumblelogs" hosted on Tumblr and the service provides various ways for users to interact with each other. Tumblr allows you to "follow" other users' blogs such that new posts of theirs appear on the home dashboard much like a news feed. One can use the search function to search for posts relating to specified content. There is a "heart" option that allows users to keep a collection of blog posts they liked. Also, users can reblog posts, or copy and repost that content onto their own blog should they like enough to share to their own followers.

Tumblr Community

Given Tumblr's light interface for posting content and reblogging content, Tumblr allows users to build up an archive of information that portrays their interests, personalities, and ideas with little difficulty. Compared to other social sites such as Twitter[14], Tumblr posts often lean towards images, Internet Memes[15], and GIFs[16]. In this way, Tumblr often serves as a provider for viral growth. GIFs in particular are rated as the number one tag in Tumblr posts. It is common for both users and non-users to search Tumblr for GIFs, or images that incorporate a repeated animation. This content then is capable of wildly spreading across other Tumblr blogs as well as other social networking platforms. Beyond Tumblr's viral capabilities, because of Tumblr's emphasis on blogging, a user's personality can serve as an anchor to build a niche in the Tumblr community. Thus, Tumblr users tend to be quite active in their interactions with other users' blogs and inevitably the platform itself.

I'm doing this topic, so I'll be adding more. :3 (David Fein)