Ask HN: Could Tumblr eventually challenge Facebook for social dominance?

[_j0lt]

Tumblr already has the attention of almost everyone under the age of 18, so imagine if Tumblr started to implement some more social features into the site. If Tumblr could play up being the 'hip new thing' to Facebook's 'old and professional'... They might have something.

Is Tumblr the internet's sleeping giant?

UPDATE: Heres some food for thought; I run a relatively "cool" blog, and my follower counts are as follow: Twitter - 1950, Facebook 'Fans' - 3,850, RSS - 4,500 ... Tumblr - 7,500 (it's up 1,000 since last week). That also translates to Tumblr being my third largest referrer after Stumble Upon and Twitter. Facebook is hard to quantify however.

[dcaldwell]

I don't know about Tumblr unseating Facebook but I think it's interesting to note the popularity of Tumblr amongst the younger crowd and ask "why?" It's interesting that Tumblr is pretty feature poor compared to other blogging services like Wordpress but is still popular. It's basically "grandma easy." However, grandma's are clamoring towards Facebook (which in my opinion is a much more difficult interface for a non web-savvy user) while the younger crows is clamoring towards Tumblr. If I were Facebook I would be more worried about dumbed down, feature-poor subsections of itself being implemented and taking away market share than another social network trying to outdo them. Even though the younger crowd is supposedly more tech savvy, I'm noticing a trend of them leaning more towards technology that has a simpler UI, oftentimes just because it has less features/options.

[dholowiski]

I don't use tumblr, but I do know the geeky early adopters have been bored with facebook for a long time and twitter for a shorter time. They (and me) are all looking for the hip new thing, maybe it's Tumblr. On a completely anecdotal note, I have heard tumblr mentioned on several podcasts recently.

[mindcrime]

Who sees Facebook as "professional?" It strikes me as a haven for noise from stupid games and ridiculous apps that are trivially amusing at best.

I can't help but think that if the world needs another social network (something I am not sure of in the first place) that one niche that needs to be filled is "useful social network;" something for professionals who are looking to get work done. Yeah, LinkedIn touches on that, but seems to be more about cataloging connections than about collaborating with people.

Anyway, what - in you guys' mind - would make a site (say, Tumblr) "hip and cool" where Facebook isn't?

[oldstrangers → mindcrime]

I refer to Facebook as professional when viewed through the eyes of a teenager (not to mention the large number of over 50s that are on the site). Even with Facebook's new UI redesign they've added a more LinkedIn like feel to the user pages. On mine for example, the first things you see are where I work and where I went to school. That's not very cool to someone who is 16.

As for hip and cool, its all about the users and perception. If the user base for Tumblr is hip and cool, it will have the effect of making Facebook's user base look anything but; or, at the very least, creating that idea for the rest of the hip and cool kids, wherein they'll join Tumblr to be with their peers (however stupid that sounds). Imagine if Justin Bieber decided facebook was lame... That's a mass exodus of about 10 million people right there.

[mindcrime → oldstrangers]

I remember a time when people spoke of Facebook as being for "The college aged crowd" and Myspace for "the high-school aged crowd." But now the perception - accurate or not - seems to be that pretty much everyone has abandoned Myspace (teenager or otherwise). I've noticed that all of my teenage relatives seem to be on Facebook... so what happened? Did teenagers leave Myspace and go to Facebook en masse? Or are teenagers still using Myspace, and I just don't notice it because I'm not part of that circle anymore? Are most teens actually on Facebook now, or are my cousins all just weird?

[oldstrangers → mindcrime]

I'm telling you, they're on Tumblr. They were kind of forced over to Facebook, but never seemed to really adopt it like everyone else.

[mindcrime → oldstrangers]

Heh, so of course when I try to sign up, I get a mondo gnarly "We'll be back shortly. Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience" message. :-)

[minalecs]

regardless of what oldstrangers is claiming, I think its very possible for Facebook to be unseated especially amongst the hipster, younger, more fickle crowd. I hear people continuously making the claim people don't want to keep creating their social graph, or entering their data over again, but I think history proves this is untrue. People will invite their friends and find friends on different sites, and will be created over again.

[shadowpwner]

Alternative question: how does tumblr get the attention of the teens, when blogspot or other blogging services don't?

[oldstrangers → shadowpwner]

Probably a combination of ease of use and interface design. The ability to easily customize your page with an endless series of well made themes can't hurt either. Blogspot just looks very dated in comparison.

[noahc → oldstrangers]

Tumblr also helps send traffic to your website. This is great when first starting out. My first post on noahc.net went to the front page. I've started a few different blogs, but seeing a few thousand visitors from the front page kept my spirits high and makes me want to hit that again.