I was browsing the image bookmarking site, weheartit.com and noticed that a lot of people are using Tumblr for redistribution of porn. I'm not passing judgement on that but if they start to do bizdev deals, they're going to have to find a way to curb it IMHO. Some of it is really, really graphic. That aside, they should be proud of their trajectory.
$4.5 Million; they deserves more credit than that. We cannot blame them for what people chose to blog for. Not being a YC company should not be a liability on HN.
Tumblr is pretty open and let people do nearly anything they want to. And they're still making money, so I don't think that the bizdevs are staying away. Considering their eventual plan for profit is selling Pro accounts, I think they can get away with that without killing their business model.
HN isn't a big pro-Tumblr site. I know the Tumblr founders are pretty separate from YCombinator (I read Marco's blog, and the only time he's ever mentioned a HN company was when he dismissed Posterous out-of-hand a few months ago), and perhaps it's just disinterest in a company that's so distant from the seed funding mentality that we find here.
Oh, well. Tumblr's an excellent service and this is great news for them.
Posterous are going to stop growing then start losing users if they just stick to all these technical fixes and don't fix the social part of their site.
We got lots coming in the pipe. Thanks for the feedback -- had a great discussion here a few weeks ago with unalone about the social aspect of reblogging. I think that will move the needle.
Absolutely. I've got nothing bad to say about Posterous whatsoever. And I doubt Marco does, for that matter. He was irritated at how TechCrunch announced Posterous as the new Tumblr, which is a fair thing to be irritated at.
I'm not a fan of straight-out blogging. I like writing lengthy pieces when I've got a chance. For me, a blog ought to be a put-everything-that-doesn't-fit-in-an-essay place. Wordpress is decent for that, but Tumblr makes it very easy for me to share things that I've found and to write about them. I can write a lot in a day and get a bunch of great scraps that focus my eventual piece. Further: all due respect to Wordpress, but Tumblr is beautiful. It's one of the best-designed sites I've ever seen.
The great thing about Tumblr is you can use it for anything. You can use it like you would Twitter, you could get images like you would on Ffffound, you can make it into a lengthy posting place, or a portfolio, or a jukebox. It's extremely versatile. And it uses the opt-in approach of seeing people, so you can build whatever community you want and still get fascinating results.
When I was weighing up blogging sites, Tumblr fast ended up on the bottom of my list for having terms and conditions that were suspiciously unclear:
"Tumblr will have a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable right, under all of Subscriber’s intellectual property rights, to copy, cache, publish, display, perform, distribute, translate and store such Subscriber Content and to allow others to do so."
So they have copyright to do what they wish with my content, and I can't withdraw it? Hm...
Contrast this to Wordpress.com's much clearer T&Cs:
"By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable."
What on earth does a little app like tumblr need 4.5 mil for? You could run the company for >10 years off that without ever charging anyone a penny. But how is that a sound investment level?
