Tumblr, the service that makes publishing to your blog a breeze seems to be showing signs that the service is dead. Granted, there have been no official announcements and the following is only my opinion based on observations that anyone can make. Upon visiting the official blog for Tumblr, the last post to be published – Tumbling Towards 2.0 was back on April 27, 2007.
The post goes on to describe the development of Tumblr 2.0 and what to look forward to. Since today is August 28th, many Tumblr users are beginning to scratch their heads, wondering what is going on. Take a look at the comments on their last blog entry and you’ll see users are already starting to ask if Tumblr is dead.
No one seems to know where Tumblr is heading. Wouldn’t that be interesting if Tumblr, tumbled into it’s own demise? As I said, it’s not for certain if the service is dead or not but all of the signs I’ve seen point to that observation. What do you think? Am I just blowing smoke?
*UPDATE* It would appear as though I’m not the only one who has brought this subject up within the past few days. Amit published a post a few days ago where Marco, a Tumblr team member responded to his post with the following comment:
Tumblr and Davidville are both doing great and we’re hard at work on Tumblr’s next release. We’ll have something to say on the blog when it’s ready, I’m sure.
This is not the Tumblr forum – it’s my personal site. Official Tumblr news will never be posted here.
But your comment is duly noted. Thank you.
Jeff you might be right. I sent them an email with a few questions a week ago and nothing back, at all. The other thing is that they were regularly posting in the month of March then bugger all.
However in saying that, you don’t roll out new features to the point that they did and then close up shop. The other thing is that they might be discussing selling the service – things tend to go quiet during these periods. Or they might be truly that busy they don’t have time.
The thing with a lot of these start-ups is that they need to work as well as maintain the service due to the fact that they run on a show-string budget. Maybe they are revenue generating?
However, if you have comments along the lines of “hello” and “anyone out there” and “is Tumblr dying” – I would be onto that quick smart.
So big questions Jeff you raise some points worth considering. Wait and see I guess. Oh did you track back to the blog entry – that might get their attention as well
Cause I’d like to know as well!!
I’ve emailed a few times and never got a response. Even tried to start a re-blogging complaint chain but it never took off. http://kittykittybangbang.madthoughts.net/post/7073458
They have been quite for a long time now that last update. unnerving.
What bothers me is that new features were promised within weeks and now its been months. Not even an apology or oops message.
Haha I posted about this on Monday -
http://customizetumblr.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/davidville-whered-you-go/
and have gotten a response from one of their developers that they are still going strong.
I have to agree with the author of this post. Tumblr is dying and I don’t want to be trapped inside it when it finally grinds to a halt.
Apart from the increasingly frequent outage (I monitor it using Pingdom), feeds regularly die as well, the only explanation being “there is a problem with this feed”. The latter now increasingly applies to the basic lifestream feeds set up by Tumblr.
I am inclined to take Marco’s announcement that he (“we”, who’s we?) is (are) “working hard on the next major update” with a pinch of salt: experience shows that if you’re working seriously on update a web product, you will quite naturally communicate regularly with your user base. This is both to keep them loyal AND because if you’re working and the result is not yet ready to share, you’ll want to show that you haven’t been idle.
With a combination of a WordPress-based tumblelog and lifestream feed derived from one of the increasingly numerous lifestream feed sites becoming available, migrating away from Tumblr would be a relatively trivial issue if it weren’t for the fact that the export API (surprise, surprise) doesn’t work (for me at any rate).
Anyone been able to get it working?
I never did get into Tumblr. I signed up, but never used the service, mainly because I liked Jaiku and Vox much better. I still do use Vox.
Just isn’t innovative anymore. I know a couple of developers who are developing blogs for people to post on, and they don’t even rival the likes of Vox or even a WordPress.com blog, and it makes me question what they were thinking.
Oh well, at least Tumblr still has Kevin Rose
I occasionally use tumblr if I come across something that isn’t suitable for my blog, or if I come across an interesting quote. I love coming across cool quotes. Based on what I’ve read though, blog services such as Tumblr will probably become more common, as blogging becomes more mainstream. It’s a shame that they just can’t post a HELLO, WERE ALIVE, you know?
Although I rarely post directly in my tumblog most of my stuff ends up there, because I use it as a scrapbook of my online presence: blogs, photos, shared links, etc. Every time I tried to contact Tumblr I got no response, including a few ones after the 2.0 upgrade. I’m starting to feel like the “safety net” is missing, and the lack of a community (official forum/ wiki) behind all this doesn’t help at all…
That is exactly why I don’t mess with it. There is no real sense of community. I just recently started a WordPress.com blog, and at least there I know I can attract people from the WordPress.com to view my stuff.
If Tumblr integrated some amazing social functions and features—it would be amazing.
Off to work right now Dave, but I will edit this post accordingly once I return. Blogging with Feed Demon is addicting
I had time to edit the post to include a link to the blog post in question. Thanks for reminding me Dave. More on this tomorrow.
Hey there, thanks for stopping by. I reblogged your Tumblr entry to try and keep the train rolling. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if the company is running on a shoe-string budget, it doesn’t take that long to update your userbase of the progress or lack thereof.
I agree with you Jason, looking at how long Tumblr has been quiet is a bit unsettling. I wonder how soon after this post, someone from the Tumblr team will publish a post stating that they are still alive and well, then tell us 2.0 will be out tomorrow LOL
I just happened to read your post Amit. It’s nice to see Marco is stating that Tumblr is still around and doing well and that they are continuing with their feature development. But lets be honest, most Tumblr users do not visit your blog for Tumblr news, nor do they visit Marco’s site and or forum. They visit the Davidville blog. There needs to be a post on that specific site that states Tumblr’s current situation.
Thanks Astorg for stopping by and leaving your feedback. It would really be a shame of Tumblr actually died as it fills a need for quite a few people. If I were running a company, I’d make sure that the lines of communication were open between myself/company and my userbase. To me, that’s just a bit of common sense. Why no one has even bothered to update the Davidville blog is beyond me.