
The real origins of Tumblr - jamesbritt
http://www.dailydot.com/business/origin-tumblr-anarchaia-projectionist-david-karp/
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burriko
It often seems to get missed that it was Why the lucky stiff that first coined
the phrase tumblelog, which is where the name Tumblr comes from. Even this
article just refers to him as a 'user of Redhanded.com'.

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pygy_
Yes, it's _why who coined the word.

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NelsonMinar
It's a well researched article, but I hate how the author did his best to
frame this as some controversy of "who invented what first". Molina and
Neukirchen both explicitly refuse to blame or resent Karp in any way, despite
given repeated opportunities.

One of the best things about the Internet is it is a medium that encourages
sharing and reinvention of ideas. Google is "just" an iteration on Altavista.
Hacker News is "just" a subreddit. Twitter is "just" a .plan file. But of
course that misses all the years of innovation, scaling, and polish. The way
Tumblr drew inspiration from a couple of personal blogs is to be praised, not
looked askance at.

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kmfrk
I wonder how many still remember Jaiku and Pownce (don't google them, no
cheating!)

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Spytap
Ah yes - I remember the great Pownce invite economy of 2007. Meanwhile, Jaiku
was where we all threatened to move whenever twitter went down (again, some
more.)

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buro9
> "I tried all of the great tools that were around at the time—WordPress,
> Blogger—and obviously all the specialized tools—Flickr for photos and
> YouTube for videos—and I kept falling down. I was perfectly happy with all
> these tools but at the same time, constantly frustrated by the limitations
> imposed by all of them."

That is the biggest driving force behind the project I'm working on
<http://microco.sm/>

The limitations of the software that powers forums and communities crushes me.

I feel that communities are incredible, have so much potential, and that they
have the ability to be more than the sum of their members, to create so much
magic through serendipity, and when the tools communities use get in the way
of this... then I feel a deep sense of loss over what should have been but
isn't, the wasted potential.

It is such a profound and deep feeling, and one that resonates so much with
the users of communities I've spoken to that users of forums funded our seed
round, that users are supporting us as we build it, and that we felt that we
had to quit our jobs and work on this... this _needs_ to exist.

The constraints today feel like chains, and the desire to break those and free
the potential is frequently overwhelming. It creates a really powerful driving
force to bring this into existence and do it justice, to free the potential of
a community.

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kfk
I like the idea of working out a better forum experience, but your page does
not really explain _where_ and _why_ you are different. Maybe you should
include a section for this somewhere.

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buro9
That page is out-of-date and we're re-writing it. We actually launched 2 weeks
ago, got a load of feedback and active users, and are currently re-
prioritising in the light of all that feedback.

The biggest difference is that within a forum, instead of just "posts in
threads", a whole slew of things can exist and are properly structured...
events, classifieds, galleries, polls, Q&A, wiki pages, articles, reviews.

No-one has to adapt a thread to be an event as an event type exists with time,
place, attendees, etc.

Imagine the first 80% of common functionality of a meetup.com page or
eventbrite page and imagine that inside a forum and that a conversation about
it can also exist.

Then imagine the same for ebay adverts, magazine reviews, long-form articles,
wiki-pages, surveys, etc.

And none of that stuff is global, it's not outside of the forum but on the
same site, it's deep within the forums, right there beside the "posts in
threads".

Instead of a community fragmenting and externalising themselves across the
web, or struggling to fit everything into a threaded conversation... every
tool a community needs gets surfaced within a forum... and even sub-forums.

Then imagine that instead of site admins and technical people determining
which sites exist and the structure of them, that the users themselves get to
define it. They can create their own sites, and their own spaces within
existing sites. The simplest way to explain this today would be sub-reddits,
but what if creating a whole new reddit.com was also available... so that the
strength of identity of a community could be fully realised.

Basically, imagine forums that could be created in seconds, and have all of
the ways in which communities and sub-communities communicate and transact
dealt with in the one place.

Instead of ebay or meetup.com trying to build a community around their
classifieds or events... imagine instead bringing the additional functionality
that communities require and embedding it deep within the place that the
community already hangout.

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arkitaip
What are your thoughts on Discourse? They are also aiming to change the
discussion board space.

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buro9
On Discourse... it is always hard to tell in the early days where a project
might go, and what the pivots may be. We all have to start somewhere and we
are judged on what we put out today more than where we are aiming for
tomorrow. I don't want to make the mistake of judging them by their current
position or their near-term roadmap. From what I've seen from the project so
far (and of course I take an interest) they are aiming at a different solution
for a different set of problems and potential market than we are.

I feel that viewing us as competitors is to view the stagnation of discussion
boards as a generalised problem. Actually the market is so vast that the
problem sets we are both aiming to solve differ. I believe both approaches
will be successful in much the same way that the blogging community have made
both Wordpress and Tumblr successful for the different approaches to blogging.
The market being so huge that even if we both have massive success (and my
definition of that is huge) we will still barely have dented it.

Would Discourse work for the set of problems I feel we are attacking? No. But
the market is so huge that for many people their problems are solved better by
Discourse than what we're doing and vice versa. So I personally think it's
great that there are more people working in this space helping to make better
forums for everyone.

Perhaps in the future we'll converge on the same solution, in which case...
great times, we'll both have a sparring partner and a good fight on our hands
to spur us on, in the mean time my thought is that they are a partner in the
fight against a plague of bad forum software.

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krenoten
"The people who plant the seed are often forgotten through history," Molina
said. "Even though one could arguably associate substantial or equal credit to
them. I'm not saying that's what I want. I just think it's interesting how the
last one wins."

There is an important concept of the second/late/last mover at play. The
explorer emperor is not as common as you would be forgiven for believing after
taking an econ 101 class. They have fewer failures to motivate changes of
course.

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vijucat
> "The people who plant the seed are often forgotten through history," Molina
> said. "Even though one could arguably associate substantial or equal credit
> to them. I'm not saying that's what I want. I just think it's interesting
> how the last one wins."

So humble and non-resentful of him! Very impressive, given that the other
party just made a billion out of it, literally.

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androidb
Just as Steve Wozniak's invention wouldn't have been anything more than a
simple hobbyist's device without Jobs, Neukirchen's creation wouldn't have had
even remotely the same impact without Karp's ideas.

~~~
glurgh
Not to detract anything from Neukirchen's and Karp's perfectly laudable
efforts and achievements but the Woz/Jobs comparisons (including those in
Marco Arment's recent blog post) are facile and specious.

Woz's design was strikingly cheaper and more capable than anything else on the
market and then it was successfully marketed as the first personal computer
with wide consumer adoption.

In the seven years it's taken Tumblr to exit by acquisition Apple:

Developed and launched the first popular consumer personal computer.

Developed and launched the first popular consumer personal computer with a
GUI.

Became highly profitable

Offered the biggest IPO in decades

It's not the same ballpark or game.

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Uchikoma
I, For One, Welcome Our New Steve 'Woz' Wozniak Correct Place in History
Overlords. And the rumors about me are lies, I'm true to the gospel, he did
not only develop a computer like dozens of others did.

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mherdeg
It's a little bit like Tesla and Edison, isn't it? Or at least the
late-90's-technology-community mythology about them.

The world has smart people who invent new things and have interesting life
stories and cool products (Tesla).

The world also has smart people who invent new things and have interesting
life stories and cool products and make a lot of money with razor-sharp
execution (Edison).

Even as folks love to lionize Tesla, it seems to me that this community is
more interested in entrepreneurs than inventors.

This was a fun story to read because it did a good job conveying how
everything everyone builds ultimately has a history — there are interesting
cultural trends that, if you watch them, can help explain why things are the
way they are today. (At least that's the theory. To be honest, knowing a fair
amount about the history of TXTMob does not give me a good sense for where
Twitter is going today.)

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mbrock
One of the takeaways might be that entrepreneurs looking to make something
shiny and earn money might stop trying to come up with their own great ideas,
and instead look at what the clever hackers are playing with for fun right
now.

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ebellity
Funny that in the origins of both Tumblr and Twitter, there is a remote German
Ruby-on-Rails developer !

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qznc
Neukirchen did not use Rails, just Ruby. He named his tool Nukumi2
<http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/nukumi2/>

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eliasmacpherson
This data structure was linked in one of the screengrabs, very interesting!
<http://cr.yp.to/critbit.html>

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swah
Wow, I used to love Anarchaia. Didn't remember it started a style.

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gcb0
This website is a textbook of bad design... They forbid zoom in mobile browser
but restrict the viewport... Can only see the left navbar and 5 words from the
article

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jamesbritt
Interesting. I read this on my G2, which by no means has an uptodate browser,
and it rendered fine, including zoom.

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seeingfurther
Yawn... another bs blog post about how this tech is a derivative of thi...
Zzzzzzzz

