Matthew Buchanan

"For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and..."

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:11:30 +1200

“For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product.”

- Good advice from Tumblr co-founder David Karp, in a frank and wide-ranging interview with Inc.’s Liz Welch.

Hot off the wire, here’s Paul Deady’s radio...

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:43:00 +1200

Hot off the wire, here’s Paul Deady’s radio interview with Tumblr founder David Karp while he was in New Zealand for the Web09 conference this past week.

"Working from the Tumblr offices today. There is a huge Orwellian plasma TV with David Karp’s..."

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:32:42 +1200

“Working from the Tumblr offices today. There is a huge Orwellian plasma TV with David Karp’s face on it. Not a joke.”

- Andrew Wilkinson on Twitter, probably referring to this. Uh guys, at least down here in New Zealand, the time displayed on that thing is slow by exactly eight hours. And David says hi, he’s having a great time despite spending too long in the sun.

John Ballinger has been tinkering all weekend and here’s...

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:29:00 +1300

John Ballinger has been tinkering all weekend and here’s the result: a great wee promo video for his upcoming Web09 conference in Auckland on April 17-18. I’m super excited to hear Steve Smith and Dan Rubin talk, but perhaps best of all, Tumblr’s creator David Karp will be delivering the closing keynote address at the two-day event. The cut-off for buying tickets is in two weeks, don’t miss out!

David has notes

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:27:00 +1200

If you’ve visited David Karp’s Tumblr page recently you’ll see he’s privy to two new features that I’m guessing will be made available to the rest of us in due course.

Firstly, as alluded to in May, David’s (and Marco’s) URLs have dropped the post/ portion and now contain just the domain name, post ID and optional summary text or “slug”. To remain backwards compatible the URLs still support the addition of the missing portion: the longer URL redirects to the newer, shorter version.

Personally I’d prefer to retain the post/ portion, as it’s more descriptive of what content the user may expect to find on the page. In fact, I can see a benefit in being more explicit, by replacing the generic post with an indication of the type of content, for example an audio post could look like this:

http://matthewbuchanan.name/audio/39428724/galvanize-the-empire

Going one step further — and this may be beyond the capabilities of Tumblr’s current architecture — why not drop the post ID from the URL altogether? Post IDs uniquely identify a post from all those made on Tumblr, but now that the service supports post summaries in its URLs, the summary text in combination with a user’s Tumblr name (or custom URL) could be used to identify any post. (The summary text portion of each post’s URL would, of course, have to be unique to its owner, but that’s a simple test to administer, and if necessary correct, when a post is created or edited. It would also only be possible if descriptive URLs were enabled in the user’s Advanced settings.)

New notes

Getting back to new features, the potentially more useful development is support for “notes”, which are for the moment only visible in the Dashboard view. On David’s page, each post indicates how many notes it has, and clicking through to the permalink page for a post displays the notes in full (eg. “david reblogged this from soxiam”).

As a social network, Tumblr is in part built around the notion of reposting others’ content, and “reblog” notes are often a good way of discovering new tumblelogs to follow. I’ll certainly be adding this feature to my own template if and when it’s released.