Comments on: Finally Getting Tumblr

By: Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » FriendFeed Appeals to Women, Too!

Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » FriendFeed Appeals to Women, Too! — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:36:01 +0000

[...] I wasn’t sure how to use both these tools without being redundant. I finally decided that Tumblr wasn’t for lifestreaming. At that point I was also on Facebook, and the newsfeed there was pretty nice as a lifestreaming [...]

By: blacky

blacky — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:23:46 +0000

I’ve thought a bit more about the whole pastebin vs. Tumblr comparison I drew up in my earlier comment. I realized that a pastebin is actually a very specialized service similar to Tumblr, but geared towards programming/computer people and their needs when using IRC.

As such, expiry is useful on a pastebin - for Tumblr it wouldn’t be.

As for content other than semi-pure text (pastbins have syntax highlighting sometimes), pastebins are pretty useless. Most disallow image linking for security (and maybe decency) reasons and none that I know of allows binary uploads. The latter is to fight piracy and keep space consumption low.

Now for Tumbler, things work differently: people will want to put images up there for others to see (does Tumblr host them?). Also, Tumblr users probably want to structure text (headings, links, paragraphs that flow etc) while pastebin users prefer literal text - most often, pastebins are used for computer/tech support, where verbatim quoting is extremely important.

In conclusion, pastebins and Tumblr have some things in common - yet they are completely differnt

By: Riccardo

Riccardo — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:15:46 +0000

Thanks Stephanie! Great post; after reading it I’m actually reconsidering now Tumblr to fulfill part of my online presence too.

I’m curious though to see if I can handle one more “output mode”… but probably yes: I’m already (like most of the people around me) switching between talking, e-mailing, writing on paper, writing digital (wiki and docs), writing SMS, chatting, blogging, bookmarking, twittering (and probably some more)…

I’m especially interested in the part where you connect tumblr with co-comment: I’d really like to bring co-commenting back, but so far I haven’t been able to do it consistently :-/

By: blacky

blacky — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:41:20 +0000

If that's the case, it's kind of a glorified pastebin, isn't it? With no expiry of course and a slightly different interface.

Can't really tell if it's useful to me, then.

(I'm a text file messie. I keep dozens of ill-named text files in a dedicated subfolder of my home dir. They contain everything from phone numbers to grocery lists and birthdays. But then, grep usually helps me find what I need. Actually, this might be a result of me being a Unix syadmin. Everything is a filesystem to me.)

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:31:02 +0000

Hmmm I don’t think Tumblr has this kind of fine privacy control. Actually, I’m almost positive I didn’t see anything about that in the settings.

It’s really dumbed down to be very simple.

By: blacky

blacky — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:04:50 +0000

What I wonder about is this: some of my notes (the paper kind) are kinda personal. Not the diary-kind personal which you wouldn't want your mum to see, but still not entirely public. Some notes however, I'd like to be able to share to people who don't have an account anywhere (and only those, in mix-and-match groups). Finally, I have very few notes that everybody might care about.

How does Tumblr address this issue of "target audience"?

Also: is there an easy way to save my notes to my computer so I can handle backup myself? That would probably make offline full-text indexing possible/easier, too.