

Driving Tumblr's popularity: Self expression matters - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/self-expression-matters.html

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Alex3917
There is a quote I like, "Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk
about things. Small people talk about other people."

Tumblr wins because it turns ideas into things and makes them easier to talk
about. Not only this, but it also makes it really easy for your writing to get
traction with others, assuming it's reasonably interesting. It's like training
wheels for future intellectuals, a perfect match for intellectually curious
kids in their late teens and early twenties. (In fact, it almost invents a new
category of online interaction that I'd call 'intellectual sociability'.)

This was my analysis of Tumblr a year ago, and I think it still holds
perfectly today: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961523>

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xelipe
I love Tumblr, been using it for nearly 4 years! While I agree that self
expression matters, at least for me, there has to be more than that. MySpace
also allowed users to change up and remix their profile page with custom
CSS/JavaScript code but they still lost users to Facebook's clean design.
MySpace became a digital ghetto, made evident by the glitter graffiti-like
images posted user's comments. What I like about Tumblr is not only that it
allows me to customize my tumblog but that it helps me with a set of great
looking templates!

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pavs
What myspace did was a horrible implementation of customization and community
features. It was an eyesore. They might have cleaned up some of their act now,
but its too little too late.

Tumblr is more like blog+facebook+twitter, made ridiculously easy; minus the
clutter and noise.

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Goladus
MySpace is arguably worse now than it ever was. The default profile looks much
better, but that's about it. There are still obnoxious ads everywhere. They've
tried to copy, poorly, a bunch of facebook features like the news feed, but
it's crammed full of commercial spam. The profile management tools are clunky
and annoying. Even their logo is now horrible.

But the issue wasn't that MySpace was an 'eyesore' or that Facebook was
'clean', except to the extent that MySpace was full of distracting ads.
Facebook is full of stupid crap, too. Facebook made the better choice to focus
on innovating community features, which was its strength, where MySpace failed
to innovate along its own strengths. Maybe was poorly designed or poorly
managed, or maybe they simply panicked and tried to be facebook but clearly
not as effectively. I don't know. But now it's a mess.

Facebook was and is a better tool for interacting with your social network
than MySpace, and continues to innovate in that space. MySpace was, at one
time, better than facebook at self-expression, media sharing, and making
connections with semi-random strangers. Now, I'm not sure it's really good at
anything particularly interesting.

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uurayan
I run a site with fairly high traction with teenagers specifically teenages
from california and tumblr is very popular with that demographic. From the
outside looking in, they seem as excited about it as I was about friendster
circa 2003, like this blogging thing was just invented. My take on the success
of tumbler, for this demo at least is that it successfully implements standard
blog tools that were once too nerdy for the masses (rss subscriptions, auto
posting to twitter / fb, making it easy to post any type of media, making it
easy to theme their blogs). In fact most of them use it like a twitter on
steroids, posting pics and videos and viewing them without having to click on
a like to a seperate service.

