
Is Tumblr the new WordPress? - inmygarage
http://wpcandy.com/thinks/is-tumblr-the-new-wordpress
======
seldo
I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another
different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and
immediately assume "and therefore we should".

Microsoft sees Google being a search engine and sinks billions upon billions
into failing to be one. Google sees Facebook being social and decides it needs
to be social (an upcoming disaster). Facebook sees Twitter being real-time and
decides it needs a real-time stream too (a bad idea they have since buried
under the "most recent" link).

In the CMS world, we have Drupal for complicated content-management, Wordpress
for full-featured blogs, and Tumblr for drop-dead-simple blogs. There is no
reason one of these products should try to fill all three roles, and no
practical way to do so (because it is, I posit, impossible to be both as
simple as Tumblr and as configurable as Drupal).

Wordpress is great. It is the leader in its category. There's no need for it
to try jumping into another category that would distract from its core
competency.

~~~
zaidf
_I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another
different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and
immediately assume "and therefore we should"._

Is it really that hard to understand? Most corporations, almost by definition,
must grow...often in multiple directions. They must expand market share in
markets they already exist in and enter new markets they previously shrugged
off.

I wouldn't say companies do this "immediately." In fact, quite the opposite.
Microsoft joked about the search market for years before realizing its more
than a joke. Ditto for google and social networking...social was seen as a
joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge of exploding.

~~~
cma
>social was seen as a joke at google circa 2006 as facebook was on the verge
of exploding

"In 2003, Google offered to purchase the social network Friendster, but the
offer was declined by that company. Google then internally commissioned Orkut
Büyükkökten to work on a competing independent project. The result was Orkut.
The product launched on January 24, 2004."

~~~
zaidf
A _failed_ purchase of a social network only proves my point, if anything.
When google really believes in a company, they go to great extremes to grab
it. See YouTube.

~~~
cma
This was 2003. Facebook didn't even exist then. Are you just trolling? Would a
big YouTube-style purchase of Friendster have even worked out well for Google?

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citricsquid
Tumblr is more than a blogging platform though, it's a _community_ , much like
Twitter. Tumblr is more like Twitter than it is Wordpress.

For example, from what I've seen this is the "average" tumblr user:
<http://soporslime.tumblr.com/>

That is not a traditional blog, not at all.

~~~
grinich
Looks a lot like old MySpace.

~~~
devtesla
At least the defaults aren't terrible.They are actually kinda nice. There is
the freedom to be terrible, and that's fine by me.

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erikpukinskis
I just moved the SproutRobot blog from Blogger to Tumblr for one reason:
People share stuff on Tumblr. No one really shares stuff on blogs.

You can add a "tweet this" or "like this" button to your blog posts, but the
only way to get Tumblr kids passing your stuff around is to have a tumblr.
Moving away from Blogger (or Wordpress) doesn't seem to sacrifice any
shareability, which is the singular purpose of blogging.

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cheez
Tumblr is the new Twitter/MySpace/Facebook. Wordpress is a publishing
platform. Tumblr is a communication platform.

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ig1
I've had blogs on LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr, and
here's my view on the difference:

Livejournal: The proto-Facebook, for personal blogging and sharing your
thoughts/lives with your friends, with a personal connection with the people
who follow you.

Wordpress.com/Blogger: Mainstream blogging, letting you share your opinion
with the world. I switched from Wordpress.com to Blogger because they inject
ads into your blogs. Neither have great editing interfaces.

Posterous: Mainstream blogging simplified, I switched from Blogger to
Posterous because it just works. I can write a post insert images and it will
come out looking decent (on Blogger/Wordpress I have to spend far longer
tweaking layout, etc.).

Tumblr: Single media micro-blogging, Tumblrs support for mixed media blogging
is very poor, you have a photo or a block of text, but not both. It's much
more about community as well, it's closer to Twitter than to the other
blogging platforms. It's all about followers and re-blogging other peoples
posts.

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Legion
I don't think it's Tumblr, but what about Posterous?

For websites where the blog is just a part of the site and not the central
component, Wordpress is overkill. And maintenance of updates and plugin
updates is a pain once you start getting beyond one or two installs.

I've been thinking that it's time to reevaluate the blogging options out there
rather than defaulting to a big-ass Wordpress install for every client that
just wants a simple blog as part of their site.

~~~
Jarred
Postereus is pretty much Tumblr for 20-somethings. From what I've seen most of
the people who have blogs in Tumblr are the generation prior to Postereus.

~~~
ianbishop
I would make the argument (as a 20-something) that there are far more
20-somethings on Tumblr than there will ever be on Posterous.

Posterous has always felt, in its design, to be minimal and content based. It
is not about posting cool photos you found online, funny youtube clips and a
quote out of the book you're reading.

That's what 20-somethings are doing with tumblr.

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jessedhillon
Has anyone ever looked at the internals of WP? You'll find all of the worst
practices known in PHP development (which I find to be a bad practice all it's
own). Maybe it's bias, but I can't imagine people who write such poor code
being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently
(which may or may not be Tumblr).

In this case the question is more about whether Tumblr serves a specific need
better than WP and not apparently about technical superiority. Still, again,
if you can infer anything about the minds behind WP from the code they write
then these guys are creating an app that was cutting-edge innovative maybe ten
years ago. For God's sake they don't even have a proper separation of logic
from presentation.

~~~
jedsmith
Though I mostly agree, I sincerely hate this, and this isn't the first time
I've seen it:

> but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete
> with a startup that actually uses technology competently

It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup.
You're assuming it's the same people, for one, and history has shown us that
code quality has nothing to do with startup success. In this specific case,
doesn't Wordpress contribute useful high-scalability software back to the
community? I'm drawing a blank but I seem to remember something like that.

~~~
jessedhillon
> It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup.

Would you say that the general cluelessness of the people at MySpace was
totally coincidental to the fact that they were probably the largest user of
ColdFusion?

You mised my point: it was not that code quality causes startup fail but that
poor technology choices are symptomatic or correlated with fail. For one, it
impairs their ability to change the focus of their product.

Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified
data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability
that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working around)
for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even a year
ago.

This is something that is trivial to support on any system designed around
proper MVC principles. A well-designed competitor could have had this years
ago.

From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a
technologically superior product.

~~~
jedsmith
I sense a lot of idealism in you. MySpace was a Microsoft platform in the end
and dropped Coldfusion, and there were far more variables related to its
failure than its technology stack (contrary to what Scoble would like you to
believe). I work for a company that uses Coldfusion extensively, and we
succeed just fine, so your grand painting of Coldfusion as a bad decision is
flawed with my sample size of 1.

> Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified
> data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability
> that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working
> around) for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even
> a year ago.

Yeah, I'd rush to commit development to that too. It sounds pretty useless
except for people who are molding Wordpress into something it wasn't
envisioned to be.

Far be it from me to defend Wordpress's code quality, but they have two things
going for them: (1) word-of-mouth and (2) install base. They got there using
the code base they had, and it didn't get in their way. With a large install
base comes responsibility. Rewriting your system and disrupting a significant
plugin install base comes with a list of cons that grows and grows.

 _Proper_ code is a misnomer. There is no such thing as _proper_. Also, MVC
doesn't apply to all use cases, and it certainly isn't a prerequisite to
"proper" or "well-designed" as you imply (even when MVC is a perfect fit,
there are alternative approaches). Wordpress went to market with what they had
and they dominate the market.

> From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a
> technologically superior product.

Technologically superior products exist. Wordpress continues to dominate. Why
is that, you think?

~~~
jessedhillon
First, this argument is about the successfulness of the WordPress internal
architecture. If you haven't looked at the internals WordPress, or written
something against their PHP API, then you're arguing from ignorance.

> I sense a lot of idealism in you.

Please do your best to limit yourself to relevant statements.

> I work for a company that uses Coldfusion extensively, and we succeed just
> fine...

This is just intellectual dishonesty: you don't reveal at all whether or not
the core of your business depends on Coldfusion, which would be important in
order to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

You work for Linode, a company that provides VPS hosting. If you make a poor
choice of technology on which to base your website, the core of your business
is not impacted. Maybe some customers gripe about your dashboard, but your
competitors will compete mainly on the superiority of their servers. If you
work for a company like MySpace (which depends on its website entirely) and
Facebook enters your market, you will not be able to find enough talented CF
programmers to fend them off. Talented programmers would not ordinarily elect
to use CF, for many reasons.

> It sounds pretty useless except for people who are molding Wordpress into
> something it wasn't envisioned to be.

Now you're simply being a contrarian. I don't think you even understand what
this feature is or how it works. And yet again, I have to remind you of the
point was: _a feature that they wanted_ took a lot of time and effort to
implement, when it could have been had trivially _with a better architecture._
In other words the technology decisions created inflexibility when
implementing a product feature.

> Proper code is a misnomer. There is no such thing as proper.

First, your college professor might have an objection here.

Second, I said "proper MVC principles", as in, _had they properly implemented
MVC principles_. I would be happy if they implemented any sort of
architecture. This is one area where, if you had knowledge of the internals of
WordPress, we could have a productive conversation, instead of simply negating
what I said in the abstract.

> Also, MVC doesn't apply to all use cases, and it certainly isn't a
> prerequisite to "proper" or "well-designed" as you imply...

Not implied at all. Had you any knowledge of the internals of the WordPress
architecture, it would again be useful to assert that knowledge so we could
discuss whether or not it conforms to _any_ notion of design. Unfortunately,
you don't seem to want to discuss the actual point of the argument, preferring
instead to deal with (ironically) ideal notions.

> Wordpress continues to dominate. Why is that, you think?

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

This kind of argument can be constructed for every company which currently
leads its market, but may in the future be overtaken by a competitor. The
relevant question is not "why does it dominate now" but "is it threatened by
X".

------
shortformblog
I feel like I have pretty good insight on this issue.

I actually use both. WordPress is my backend for Tumblr. I run a news blog
called ShortFormBlog ( <http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/> ), which has content
that works well on Tumblr but requires a more robust approach in terms of the
creation of the content due to the fact that the posts tend to be more
graphical in nature. Which is where WordPress comes in.

It has a lot of benefits. When breaking news happens, I don't have to cover
every piece of the story … I can reblog the missing pieces from other news
Tumblrs. And if I want to do more detailed posts, I can switch back to my
customized WordPress backend, which has a modified version of TinyMCE and
Tumblrize to allow me to do more design-heavy posts. I also get to keep an
archive of the stuff that took more time so it's held in a non-centralized
place.

The overall benefit? At 6,000 followers and counting in just six months, I
have a much larger audience than I ever did with the WordPress site. There's
much more communication with readers, and since it's centralized as opposed to
all over the place, it's easier to latch onto. I also have gotten some media
coverage from Mashable and Mediaite, and I've even worked with the Tumblr
staff on some things.

WordPress has its uses, but Tumblr has major advantages that you can't get
with a self-hosted site. The community is there and it's been well-nurtured.
That's as good a reason as any to give it your attention.

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fooandbarify
I have never known a time where Wordpress was not way more bloated than Tumblr
is now, and I've been using Wordpress for about 5 years. That being said, the
comparison is only valid when comparing them as _services_ \- as far as I
know, Tumblr is not available as a platform to use on your own server. (That
sucks, because the Tumblr service is extremely unreliable.) As services,
though, Tumblr is way more fun to write on.

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jacques_chester
I refer upvoters to my previous comment on this phenomenon:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493>

The tl;dr version is that fill-in-the-blank linkbait titles are a bit tedious.

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joelrunyon
>Putting aside the flack Tumblr has gotten for their downtime issues of late,

I love how the author just brushes this off like it's not a big deal. I've
tried to use tumblr because everyone goes silly for it, but I wasn't able to
even set up an account because the site was down. That's fine for something
like twitter but if using tumblr as a publishing tool for my business, what am
I supposed to do when it's down?

Tumblr? No thanks. I'll take a wordpress site on my own servers all day long.
If I really want some other platform to simply publish on, posterous is drop
dead simple and doesn't go down.

But, that's just my .02...

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kariatx
It's the new LiveJournal, and I mean that in the best possible way.

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diN0bot
in an ideal codebase, such as might result from vertical-slice features being
added iteratively plus thoughtfully designed features, feature groups and
permissions, could a mature product like wordpress not present different
levels of simplicity? "enable simple blogging only" v "enable full cms"

I have first hand experience with this and I think it is not only possible,
but a reasonable goal for any well designed product. (the advantage of dynamic
feature walls is already a huge win)

~~~
jacques_chester
Wordpress, like Microsoft, are bound by the golden anchor of backwards-
compatability. One of their big selling points -- the multitude of themes and
plugins -- is also what prevents them from making any radical architectural
improvements.

~~~
calvin
They're dumping PHP4 and MySQL4 support in WordPress 3.2. You're right, they
have to consider support for existing themes and plugins, but they're not
chained to the past.

~~~
jacques_chester
They're going to start using PHP 5 features, but that won't remove the large
amount of PHP 4 code they already have. Neither will it remove the vast body
of plugins/themes from play, most of which are updated quite sporadically.

If there's anything that will cause internal architectural changes, it's the
project's general focus on new features over any other goal.

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kylec
As interesting as Tumblr is, I'm extremely wary of switching to it because of
the downtime issues they've had:

[http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-
un...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-
blogging-services-2/)

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Apocryphon
Microblogging is the new blogging?

~~~
jacques_chester
Personally I think that nanoblogging will change everything. I'm going to
launch a site where the interface consists only of a selection of emoticons.

~~~
kongqiu
Picoblogging FTW!

~~~
jacques_chester
Seen on HN circa late 2013:

 _Yoctoblogging poised to disrupt Microfacegle (techcrunch.com)_

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brackin
I think it is, it's really easy to create a theme or port a static site over
to make it dynamic. Half of tumblr's users are teen girls but they are geeks
so they make lot's available for us geeks to use it to hack.

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Tichy
If only Tumblr would work well, I would love to switch, and move all my family
to Tumblr, too. But somehow the fancy interface never works when I try it.

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kmfrk
No.

>Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging
platform”?

Have WordPress really ever been called that? The admin/settings interface is
ridiculous.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Have WordPress really ever been called that?

Yes it has. When compared to drupal and the like, people used to say it only
did one thing (blogging) and did it well. I think this is still true.

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strebel
Nice dialog. Thanks for the good conversation around this topic. Glad it
sparked some feedback.

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bad_user
No.

