tumblr

I’m a regular reader of a vc and in a recent post he talked about one of his investments in a company called tumblr. To use his words “It’s the next logical step in the blogging phenomenon. It allows you to blog quickly, easily, from your phone or your computer, it encourages reblogging and pulling content in from twitter, typepad, wordpress, blogger, flickr, delicious, last.fm, etc, etc”

Sounds interesting..

But do I really need another aggregator of information? I already have my blog, facebook and to a very limited extent Linkedin. Broadly speaking, I use facebook to track my personal stuff, Linkedin for my work stuff and my blog for writing about things that interest me. None of it is perfect and thats what made me look at tumblr. The problem with the other aggregators.

Facebook - it just doesn’t do a good job of letting me decide who can see what. But for public stuff using addons I will over time be able to aggragate all this info there. The downside - I have little control over the layout today. But it’s easy to use.

My blog - over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

LinkedIn - the orginal place for all my work contacts - it does nothing more - I wonder whether this will shift into a group within facebook because of this - what if it did allow you to aggregate work related content? Would I use it more?

So again I wonder why use tumblr. Fred Wilson’s tumblr page reminds me of the news feed inside facebook. There is no context so flickr photos are mixed with twitter posts which in turn is mixed with blog posts. Sure I get to see everything Fred Wilson - is that useful?