Tumblr

Introduction

Tumblr is a blogging platform launched by David Karp in 2007, and has grown to host more than 46 million blogs as of February 2012. Tumblr blogs are typically classified as “microblogs” (once called tumblelogs), which differ from normal blogs in that the content of each microblog post tends to be minimal in content. Other microblogging services include Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk, most of which are solely used to post status updates in the user’s daily life. Unlike these services, Tumblr is not limited to status updates. It instead separates blog posts into the following categories instead: text, links, quotes, music, and video. Furthermore, according to Tumblr, the average user makes 17 posts a month, with half of those being photo posts.

Features & Impact

Like other blogging platforms, Tumblr is split into a user’s individual blog, and a user’s “Dashboard” (which the user tracks to follow updates to other peoples’ blogs, akin to the Facebook and Twitter front pages, or a Livejournal friends-list page). Tumblr Dashboards tend to update very quickly, with users making multiple posts a day, but Tumblr users tend to be more inclined to travel back in time through their Dashboard to catch up on any posts that they have missed. This is in direct contrast to Facebook and Twitter, where users are more likely to only glance through the most recent updates before moving on.

The advantage that Tumblr has over other blogging/social media platforms, and its role in the World Wide Web, comes down to the fact that while Tumblr acts like a microblogging platform, it also retains the potential to convey more meaningful information than sites like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter put emphasis on personal, short updates (especially so in the case of Twitter, with its 140-character limit), while Tumblr is much more open to a much wider variety of post topics. Tumblr users can limit themselves to making short status updates in their blog, but they can also make longer, more meaningful posts, share all types of media with commentary, and still make all these posts as often and as quickly as they like. In short, Tumblr comes with all the ease and speed of microblogging, with fewer restrictions on microblogging content. 

One of Tumblr’s greatest features is the ability to “reblog”, or the ability to easily repost content from one tumblog to your own tumblog (akin to “retweeting” on Twitter). In some cases, this can facilitate extremely fast sharing of content or information, as posts are shared and spread from blog to blog across the entire Tumblr userbase.

This, combined with the variety of posts/media shared, and the size of Tumblr’s userbase, has placed Tumblr in a position where it has great influence on the World Wide Web in general. It has proved to be a good platform to raise awareness or share information across a large userbase. Its ease-of-use has made it a popular choice for blogging platforms, even those hosted outside of Tumblr itself.

Logistics

Currently Tumblr is facing the transition from a small startup to a larger company. Their engineering team consists of around 20 engineers to handle Tumblr’s high traffic flow: 500 million pageviews per day, 30% growth rate per month, and 50GB worth of blog post data per day, along with other less obvious requests being sent in the background. With these current traffic stats (and likelihood of future growth), Tumblr quickly became hard-pressed to seek highly scalable architectures.

While Tumblr initially began as a LAMP application (which refers to a stack of open-source software commonly used to build web servers: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), it now seems to be moving towards newer solutions to handle scalability, such as: HBase (a distributed database), Redis (a key-value data store), Kafka (from LinkedIn, to store messages), Finagle (from Twitter, a Remote Procedure Call system), and the Scala programming language.

Current Issues

Perhaps as a result of having to deal with scalability issues, several other of Tumblr’s features have been neglected. One of the oldest and still-prevalent issues is the defunct and useless search box that appears on individual tumblogs. From within the Tumblr Dashboard, the “Search Tags” feature is somewhat more successful, though it will still often drop or miss posts that should be showing up in the results, or fail to update with new posts at all. Some of Tumblr’s features have also been limited for the sake of scalability, such as putting limits on the number of “Asks”/messages that a user can send per hour, and the character length of these messages. 

Furthermore, the Tumblr UI is not as easy to use as many users would like. As a result, many Tumblr users have installed the browser extension Missing E to improve their Tumblr blogging experience. Missing E is a set of tools and interface changes that improve the general usability of the site. Some of the features of Missing E include the inclusion of dashboard bookmarks, clearer timestamps, 1-click reblogs, and the inclusion of scripts that allow for easy replying to comments left by other users on a post. However, the Missing E developer and Tumblr have come to disagreements in the past. Tumblr has discouraged users to use Missing E on the basis that could compromise users’ security and privacy, while Missing E has refuted those claims and provides its source code for users to confirm safety. 

All the same, Tumblr’s current policy is to not answer help requests from users who have Missing E installed, due to their help desk receiving too many requests for help on Missing E issues (which are separate from Tumblr ones). 

Conclusion

While Tumblr has certainly become a popular and successful platform for blogging, it faces many problems in the near and far future that must be resolved. From my experience, large portions of the userbase have displayed dissatisfaction with Tumblr's UI and performance. While it seems that the engineering staff have made steps towards resolving those issues, many are still dependent upon external web extensions to maximize user experience, which should not be necessary.

Sources

Cutler, Jeremy. Missing e {browser extension for tumblr}. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr 2012. <http://blog.missing-e.com/>.
Hoff, Todd. "High Scalability - High Scalability - Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter." High Scalability. N.p., 13 Feb 2012. Web. 28 Apr 2012. <http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architecture-15-billion-page-views-a-month-and-harder.html>.
Various. Tumblr Engineering. Tumblr, n.d. Web. 28 Apr 2012. <http://engineering.tumblr.com/>.
Unknown. "About | Tumblr." Tumblr. Tumblr, n.d. Web. 28 Apr 2012. <http://www.tumblr.com/about>.