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posted by Rick Webb
Rick Webb
Rick Webb

Co-founder, COO : New York

topics: Brands, Measurement and Analytics, Strategy, Internet Culture, and Automotive

on February 17, 2009 at 07:41 PM
filed under: Social Media and User Experience
http://tbg.cm/fNQuvb
Man I totally realized something about Tumblr today. Every time I talk about Tumblr I express my frustration at how it doesn’t feel as participatory as other blog services (I come from a Livejournal background), because you can’t comment and have discussions about things. I’ve had this conversation with like five people – I recently had it with Buzz Anderson and even more recently with Michelle DeForest of NextNewNetworks.
Buzz was of the opinion that most of his comments were fine on an average post, but then a post would get on Digg or Slashdot and then like 10,000 people would come in and make annoying posts about how stupid or dumb or this or that, and that just wasn’t useful, and that obviously if I wanted to comment I could email and we’d talk, etc. That made a lot of sense, really, but it seemed to me that was more about the preference to not have comments, which is fine for an individual blogger, but really weird on a whole blogging platform.
But then I was talking to Michelle a few weeks ago, talking about how I loved the participatory feel of the comments on LJ, and how Facebook’s implementation was a bit off (because EVERY person that comments on a note gets an email notification whenever ANY other person comments, so after a while you resent having commented because of the spam, so you want to stop, but I digress). The point was that the participatory feel of both felt great, and I missed that.
Michelle reassured me that this was the case on tumblr. That there was a whole culture of it, involving the “like this” button and the re-blog, and I was vaguely familiar with these things, but I didn’t get it. She said she’d explain it to me sometime but then I got the flu.
SO TODAY, I found a new Tumblr blog that I liked. So, for me, this means finding a blog, and realizing it’s a Tumblr blog because I see the little follow in the corner. I click “follow” to let them know I’m following them, but then I just add the RSS feed to my feed reader. I don’t really read the Dashboard, mainly because I like to read shit in RSS, and there’s no RSS feed of the dashboard.
And THIS, I now realize, is where I fail! Because on your dashboard, you can say you love things by clicking the heart, and re-blog it by clicking the “re-blog” button and you can see how many other people and who did these things on each post your friends and you make. And while you can’t COMMENT, I get it – this is a nice way to encourage social interaction without it descending into hatred and difficulty. It’s actually kind of cool.
But the problem for me is that not only are those tools not in the RSS feed, I didn’t even realize they really existed because they weren’t there. If the RSS feed had links to heart something and reblog it, that would be awesome. OR EVEN if you opened the link, it went to your dashboard page version of it, so you could click those buttons. Right now it goes to their tumblr page, and those buttons aren’t there.
So yeah. I’m not sure how I’m going to work around this. It seems super complex to read a three week old post on a tumblr I sporadically follow in my feed reader, love the post SO MUCH that I go to my dashboard and scroll back three weeks until I find it so i can click the little heart. But I would LOVE to participate more.
Thoughts? Should I just give up and use the dashboard? Can I make a plea to tumblr for authenticated, or at least “logged in” feeds that include links to hearts and re-posts and shows how many other people like it?
In any case, it’s nice to at least understand it a bit more.

9 comments

I feel you, every time I tell people I read Tumblrs via RSS I get a little speech about how I'm missing out.

With that said, it just occurred to me as I was reading this that you could say all the same things about Twitter (which you just happen to use in the way they've laid out for you -- or at least tools have been built to facilitate a usage pattern you're comfortable with). Maybe that's all that's missing from Tumblr?
Wow that is a really good point. Here's what I think the differences are:

Both with twitter and tumbr you follow people. And on both of them people can follow you.

However, on twitter it's actually very easy to see who follows you, but on Tumblr, it's actually kind of hard to figure out who's following you. So a mutuality is harder to be aware of. So on twitter, you easily know which people are following you, so you can leave a message on your twitter and be reasonably sure they'll read it. Personally I find that annoying as hell and wish it didn't happen but whatever. It does sort of work.

Additionally, and this might be a whole interesting point - twitter has a great API, so people can make tools to more easily find mutual followers, AND search.twitter.com (the old Summize, built on the API, before twitter bought it) allows you to search for your @name, and subscribe to an rss feed. It's a bit of a hack, but it does further facilitate two-way communication.
Actually, you can like/reblog a post on it's own page, not only on your dashboard. Just make sure you're logged in to tumblr. Then you have the heart, reblog, follow and dashboard buttons in the top right corner of every tumblelog.
@ jeremy - ah, I see it now. it's not a tumblr main page - the tumbelog - up there is only unfollow and dashboard. But it seems if you click ont he date of a certain post and get to an individual post's page, it adds the heart and reblog page.

I'd still love to have them in the RSS though. ;)
So maybe it's the feed reader that's the problem? Very little "innovation" or "transformation" or whatever the word du jour is has happened with feed readers. I stopped using them (http://www.machinelake.com/2006/05/17/remembering-how-to-think/) awhile ago because they weren't helping.

I've seen a few attempts to rethink what it means to read a feed, Gonzo Reader (http://gonzoreader.110mb.com/index.html) might be the least intrusive. But we're still talking RSS. Like you (and others mention), what about Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and the rest? Sticking with RSS is a compromise--a stripped down, very plain view into those streams. And unless you're using something like Flock (http://flock.com/) or Cruz (http://cruzapp.com/), the browser alternatives aren't great either.
@gavin - yeah, I definitely think the feed is the problem. Is that intentional? Not thought out? Is it indicative of a business plan or a lack of thinking of proper user flows I wonder.
I re-blog quite a few tumblr posst i follow in my google reader and do a link back. i dont think the original posters really notice or see that at all unfortunately. wouldnt mind it if they did. i dont miss the commenting so much.
but if there were sufficient innovation/transformation in the feed reader, wouldn't it just end up functioning like the original blog/tumblr/site? hmm. all of a sudden I feel less embarrassed about the fact that I simply use my feed reader as a portal for links to the blogs and other sites I wanna read which have new content. and then I engage with the content on the actual site itself.
I've been suspecting this about Tumblr for the past week or so, since my own traffic stopped increasing and flatlined. I went from 20-50 hits a week to zero. Not exactly an earth-shattering number, but it was growing steadily. It didn't dawn on me that maybe readers were consuming my stuff via RSS until a friend mentioned it was his favored means of digesting said content. Now I finally understand.

Tumblr needs to allow some kind of authentication to join in on the fun via RSS, or at the very least, offer us some way to track who's following our RSS feeds (short of hacking it with Feedburner.) I would vote loudly for each of these features.