Tumbularity

As a matter of principle, I fear and thus despise the new and the different. That said, notes on tumblr’s new feature, Tumblarity.

1. The design is really neat. Keep it up, tumblr designers!

2. The Tumbluality score in my Dashboard reminds me of my mortality. Stop that. Let me hide that rapidly decaying metric or I swear to Christ I’ll never visit my Dashboard again. Consider yourself threatened. (J/K love you, tumblr!)

I know your intent was to incentivize kids to keep on putting change in the slot to watch the number grow, but it makes me all nervous and pukey. What happens when my number shrinks ever towards zero? Do my body parts start vanishing from pictures? Seriously. Stop it.

3. Across the quad at Twitter, we play a little game called Favrd. It’s fun to play because (like tumblr), it’s fun to keep track of how many people faved something you wrote. At the end of the day, Favrd keeps tabs on who got the most faves on the Leaderboard. And a spot on the Leaderboard is a real kick in the pants. Makes you feel good. Makes you want to keep playing. And the best part? It starts all over the next day. Tabula rasa. The only number that persists is the number of people who read your content. If I had a running all-time tally of how many times I’d been faved, synthesized into an ambiguous number that punished my mellow post frequency by dropping rapidly, I’d hate Favrd and I wouldn’t play the game.

4. We’ll take it as read that the name is a play on “Popularity”, correct? So it seems like tumblr had to confront and then conspicuously step around naming the new feature “Tumbularity” which, for my money, from an aesthetic and linguistic standpoint, rolls off the tongue with far less friction.

We’re to assume that “Tumblarity” is a noun, right? What, then, is the adjective form of Tumblarity? Tumblarious? That’s dumb. And there’s no excuse for dumb fake grammar.

Was the avoidance a choice to steer clear of the idea of Popularity while somehow still alluding to it? Because you’re right. Popularity is kind of gross.

5. I haven’t a clue what my Tumblariety score means. Thus, it’s not much of a score, which makes it not much of a game. I stay away from games that I don’t understand. Granted, I’m dense, so this rules out Monopoly, the stock market, World of Warcraft, and dating, but I can’t see myself getting much into a game I feel a near-complete lack of control over.

6. I know there’s something here. I’m not a Luddite. But I’m just not feeling it yet.

7. tumblr never stops innovating and that’s why tumblr is an incredible platform. Keep it up, tumblr!

May 08 2009 12:20pm
“I want to open up transparency in government, so that you guys know what is happening. I want to revamp our White House website. I know it’s nice to take the virtual tour of the China Room,” he notes sarcastically, “but I want people to be able to know, ‘today, this issue is going on…today’s President Obama talked about his proposal for $4000 student college tuition credits, it’s going to be going into this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate that are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that are involved that are supporting it, you should contact your Congressman. Just creating the situation that if people want to get involved and it’s easy. The information is out there, but trying to track it down isn’t…The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that’s the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That’s how we are going to counteract the special interests.
—

excerpt from Obama’s speech to his staff

via obama08

Could it be that the aspiration of this candidate is to make of his White House a platform for community involvement?  Is he, in essence attempting to make a technologically-aided social network in the service of democracy?  If so, would he be instituting the most open and participatory executive branch our nation has seen, directly following the most closed and secretive?  Huh.  Something to think about.  Oh, the answers are: yes, sure, and of course.

Jun 10 2008 10:55pm
TUMBLR DASHBOARD? this one’s for the tumblr community. to you, i pose a question: How do you use the Dashboard? as you probaby know, the Dashboard of your tumblr site is the main method for posting to your tumblr blog (deal, sticklers - i call it a tumblr blog). it’s easy and clean and awesome and can be credited with much of the success of tumblr. however, the Dashboard can also be used as a way of browsing the posts of other tumblr users. every tumblr blog has an ‘Add to friends’ button which allows you to collect your favorite tumblr blogs in your account, much like a social network. once you’ve added some friends to your account and activated the ‘Show their posts’ feature, the latest posts of your friends will show up in your Dashboard, interspersed throughout your own. now, i was under the impression that nobody really used this feature until i saw some video of someone using it for this purpose. i use the phrase ‘like a social network’ because tumblr isn’t, at its core, a social network. there is no message/mail system in place for communicating with the friends you accumulate, other than Adding them and linking and/or shouting out to them in your own blog. there is no way of sharing only with your friends, there’s no way of direct messaging. i do use the ‘Add to friends’ button from time to time. i use it to kind of collect the tumblr blogs i find interesting, and to give a thumbs-up to the tumblr user, in case they happen to be insecure and hungry for appreciation like i am. but i don’t use it to read friends’ posts in my own tumblr site. if i like a tumblr blog, i subscribe to its RSS feed and read it in NetNewsWire. to me, this is a way of treating a tumblr blog with the same respect as a more traditional blog. just because i don’t want to deal with Wordpress shouldn’t mean i am less of a blogger. while there are social networking aspects to the ‘Add to friends’ feature, it is unlike a social networking app in that 1) i’m not asked or told when someone adds me as a friend (the only way to know is to compulsively check) and 2) i’m not able to see what tumblr blogs other users have as friends (which could actually be useful in finding tumblr blogs to read, as is the case with Twitter, the microblogging app). i’ll admit, i do keep tabs on the users that have friended me. vanity dictates that i do, much like a myspace or a facebook. just yesterday, i posted a photo i’d found on a plastic surgery site - something that i found funny, if mildly offensive. within 2 minutes, my friend counter was down 1. i panicked and removed the post (which in hindsight, was probably a good idea - if you’re curious, i could share it with you) but i wonder if in this case, the one social networking aspect of tumblr had a negative impact on my blogging? so again, i pose the question, to those who care to respond: How do you use the Dashboard?

TUMBLR DASHBOARD?

this one’s for the tumblr community. to you, i pose a question: How do you use the Dashboard?

as you probaby know, the Dashboard of your tumblr site is the main method for posting to your tumblr blog (deal, sticklers - i call it a tumblr blog). it’s easy and clean and awesome and can be credited with much of the success of tumblr.

however, the Dashboard can also be used as a way of browsing the posts of other tumblr users. every tumblr blog has an ‘Add to friends’ button which allows you to collect your favorite tumblr blogs in your account, much like a social network. once you’ve added some friends to your account and activated the ‘Show their posts’ feature, the latest posts of your friends will show up in your Dashboard, interspersed throughout your own.

now, i was under the impression that nobody really used this feature until i saw some video of someone using it for this purpose. i use the phrase ‘like a social network’ because tumblr isn’t, at its core, a social network. there is no message/mail system in place for communicating with the friends you accumulate, other than Adding them and linking and/or shouting out to them in your own blog. there is no way of sharing only with your friends, there’s no way of direct messaging.

i do use the ‘Add to friends’ button from time to time. i use it to kind of collect the tumblr blogs i find interesting, and to give a thumbs-up to the tumblr user, in case they happen to be insecure and hungry for appreciation like i am. but i don’t use it to read friends’ posts in my own tumblr site. if i like a tumblr blog, i subscribe to its RSS feed and read it in NetNewsWire. to me, this is a way of treating a tumblr blog with the same respect as a more traditional blog. just because i don’t want to deal with Wordpress shouldn’t mean i am less of a blogger.

while there are social networking aspects to the ‘Add to friends’ feature, it is unlike a social networking app in that 1) i’m not asked or told when someone adds me as a friend (the only way to know is to compulsively check) and 2) i’m not able to see what tumblr blogs other users have as friends (which could actually be useful in finding tumblr blogs to read, as is the case with Twitter, the microblogging app).

i’ll admit, i do keep tabs on the users that have friended me. vanity dictates that i do, much like a myspace or a facebook. just yesterday, i posted a photo i’d found on a plastic surgery site - something that i found funny, if mildly offensive. within 2 minutes, my friend counter was down 1. i panicked and removed the post (which in hindsight, was probably a good idea - if you’re curious, i could share it with you) but i wonder if in this case, the one social networking aspect of tumblr had a negative impact on my blogging?

so again, i pose the question, to those who care to respond: How do you use the Dashboard?

Oct 15 2007 12:05pm
Birdhouse — A notepad for Twitter