Tumblr Redux
Posted at 10:15 pm on Thursday, May 29, 2008, in Technology, and tagged blogs, tumblr.
Tumblr has made a series of “improvements” to its blogging system in the last few months. I put the term improvements in quotes because improvements is relative. The popular blogging tool has introduced new permalink URLs and tags. The reason I’m poking fun at their expense is that Tumblr was supposed to be for people who didn’t like all the baggage that came with WordPress and MovableType, like tags and permalink URLs.
And it is not as if the permalink URL is sensible. It adds a string of words to the end of the URL (separated by dashes), and chooses those words from your entry title or entry text (in the case that no entry title is provided). This is not the nonseniscal part; that comes when you realize that the numeric string still exists. In the end, you are left with DOMAIN.com/12345678/tumblr-urls-make-no-sense. And that is only if you have an item title. If there is no item title, and the blogging tool picks words from your entry text, you are likely to get a very silly URL, e.g., DOMAIN.com/12345678/tumblr-has-added-new-url-system-and-it. Where is “sucks?” It should be there, because that is what’s coming.
It makes sense that Tumblr’s growth will include typical blog entities, like tags and custom URLs, but that is exactly why I called Tumblr’s rise a ruse. Tumblr is not any different — in spirit and core function — than any other blogging system, except that it lacks many aspects that make blogging more useful.
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