Tumbled.
I was playing around with Tumblr tonight, it’s a pretty cute little app. For shits and giggles I set up an account to try it out, and the result can be found here.
Tumblr is pretty appealing for a few reasons.
First off, it’s DEAD simple to use. I feel like I could offer it up with the most minimal guidance to someone who wanted to blog but didn’t care for mucking around in the guts of the internet. I’d say it’s even easier to use than the Blogger platform, just because of the minimal design and super simple/friendly UI.
Speaking of design, the backend experience is quite well polished. The ‘dashboard’, what you see when you want to post something new to your Tumblr page, is layed out clearly with a central focus on your previous posts, and big clear buttons lead to other features.
Tumblr offers a few methods of posting, which I’ve sampled below. There’s basic text posts like this one, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video posts. These different varieties of posts determine which fields you fill out when posting something new, and they make it really easy to present a wide range of content.
When designing my own blog this kind of partioning of content felt like on of the larger aesthetic hurtles. I’m still not completely satisfied with my Sights, Sounds, and Et Cetera categories, but it works for most of what I publish. Tumblr’s solution is great if you don’t want to spend too much time introspecting your own format of postings. Tumblr also offers tagging for posts, but it’s within the ‘advanced options’ field at the bottom of each post-authoring page.
One of Tumblr’s features that really interests me is the ability to easily create group blogs. I’m a member of a few mailing lists, and I think some of them could benefit from Tumblr’s simple this-is-something-cool-I-found template. It wouldn’t be very hard at all to get together a couple of people with common interests and internet connections to create something akin to BoingBoing, but with any manner of subject matter.
I think Tumblr has a lot of potential to reach potential-bloggers, thanks to it’s balance between simplicity and capabilites. Cheers to free and well-designed web services that make sharing easier.