It's fascinating how similar the announcements are. And "incredible journey" becomes a phrase devoid of all meaning after scrolling through two pages of that tumblr.
The worst ones are the ones where they are SO EXCITED to be becoming part of the X family and oh by the way we're shutting everything down in two weeks thanks all peace out.
That was depressing. :( There's something about this whole thing... one or two huge companies that buy up every fun site or service in the universe and then closing them. It makes me sad.
And now I guess it's time to prepare for the closing of Tumblr in the future. Grr.
Honestly, I'm not sure. tumblr is a lot bigger than the sites listed there (all of which I've never heard of, but try running into a user on the internet who hasn't, in some way, heard of tumblr). I don't think the use cases are the same.
It's incredibly upsetting to see that. So many new, creative companies that are initially funded with VC seed money, only to disappear two or three years later once Google, Yahoo or Facebook buys them out, mostly to grab the people, but leaving the actual creations those people created to die.
How much chance is there of setting something up that can import from Tumblr to DW before Yahoo shuts Tumblr down? I believe Tumblr has a fairly plausible API, right? It's too big a project for me, sadly, but it would be a huge boost to DW if someone could do it!
You're absolutely right, if someone could figure that out it'd be huge for DW. I think it'd be the first non-LJ codebase site that could be imported, and in the parts of Tumblr I hang out in there's a huge audience overlap with DW. I actually came up with a manual method to import from Tumblr to LJ, but it relies on LJ's repost function.
On the technical side the importer wouldn't have to worry about followers/followed, because on Tumblr those relationships hold no special privileges anyway. And Tumblr lets people rename freely, with the caveat that links inside of posts can break at any time, so the importer wouldn't need to worry about re-writing username references. I think the only difficulty might be in tags - the way they're used on Tumblr, some people might hit a few thousand tags inside of a week, and there's no way all those tags could be imported to DW.
On the other hand, many of those tags aren't used as search-metadata but as content-metadata, and those are often the accounts with thousands of them. Perhaps a checkbox, on import, for "yes try to map the tags as tags" or "no, include all tags as text footers to the entry content" with the caveat that after a certain processing limit, all tags will become text footers, and/or the opportunity to add a unique tag to the import so the entries can be found again easily.
Hmm, if it was me I'd make it so that any tags the user created on their account BEFORE the import would end up tagging the entries containing that tag, and then do the "include all tags as text footers to entry content" option too. That would make it so that if there were some tags that would be useful to have as tags as opposed to just context, it would be automatic to have them.
Oh, good thought! And DW has the handy tag renaming, in case anyone wants to adjust their DW tags to match their Tumblr versions before they import. Perhaps a note to that effect, reminding people of the possibility when they go to the import page, would be useful.
Well, Yahoo isn't going to shut down Tumblr, I can tell you that much--at least not until it's already been floundering under their care for years. They might change Tumblr in ways the userbase doesn't like, but they're not going to shut it down--$1.1 billion is not an aquihire, which is what's being chronicled up there with most of the "incredible journeys".
(For others following along: An aquihire is what happens when you need/want specific tech talent that's hard to get. You find a wee startup company doing what you want that talent to do and just buy them up. LJ was in most respects an aquihire for Six Apart, the only thing not fitting the mold is LJ actually brought in income so they didn't shut it down, and it was valuable enough to the Russian demographic that they could sell it when they wanted to get rid of it. But they took the tech talent like Brad and set them to work developing Vox. Which never took off how they wanted and they shut down anyway. But they definitely made their money back for LJ.)
Meyer has plans for Tumblr, and it fills a badly needed gap in Yahoo's portfolio. We can't say what those plans *are* yet, but they're not shutting the sucker down, that's for sure.
OK, that's really interesting! I have only heard the vaguest of rumours about the deal, I'm obviously looking in the wrong places. I still don't think Tumblr actually has a business model, so I am intrigued (in a slightly terrified way) to see how Yahoo reckon they're going to monetize it. But it makes sense that they've bought it to use it, not to shut down a rival or poach the programming talent.
Tumblr has started to have a business model! Of course, it's ads, but what they're attempting to do is better paid brand advertising rather than just your basic dreadful CPM treadmill. They sell premium themes/styles, but I think that's not a huge money maker.
There was a piece on Buzzfeed about how Tumblr has the 18-24 demographic which Yahoo wants to capture.... and well, it wasn't the best written article which is why I'm not bothering to track down a link, but that is reasonably compelling point.
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And now I guess it's time to prepare for the closing of Tumblr in the future. Grr.
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On the technical side the importer wouldn't have to worry about followers/followed, because on Tumblr those relationships hold no special privileges anyway. And Tumblr lets people rename freely, with the caveat that links inside of posts can break at any time, so the importer wouldn't need to worry about re-writing username references. I think the only difficulty might be in tags - the way they're used on Tumblr, some people might hit a few thousand tags inside of a week, and there's no way all those tags could be imported to DW.
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(For others following along: An aquihire is what happens when you need/want specific tech talent that's hard to get. You find a wee startup company doing what you want that talent to do and just buy them up. LJ was in most respects an aquihire for Six Apart, the only thing not fitting the mold is LJ actually brought in income so they didn't shut it down, and it was valuable enough to the Russian demographic that they could sell it when they wanted to get rid of it. But they took the tech talent like Brad and set them to work developing Vox. Which never took off how they wanted and they shut down anyway. But they definitely made their money back for LJ.)
Meyer has plans for Tumblr, and it fills a badly needed gap in Yahoo's portfolio. We can't say what those plans *are* yet, but they're not shutting the sucker down, that's for sure.
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