I came to the job as a fan. I had emailed Tumblr on a whim, telling them of my admiration and absolute belief that it was going to be the next big thread in the social fabric of the Internet:
“As I find myself discovering daily Tumblr awesomeness, I thought, “This is exactly the place where I want to help build and make better.””
A few months later, John called me on the phone while I was in Argentina and a few weeks later, I met David and the team and instantly felt at home.
I wrote a Medium thingy.
(via What I gained from working at Tumblr)
david:
Dedication to his art
Man, now I’m all reminiscing about Tumblr. 2 years ago all of 40 people maybe piled into a rental in the Hamptons. That summer was fun times for the company. :)
“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”
Will Yahoo Try to Get Its “Cool Again” by Doing a Deal for Tumblr?
Oh god, as someone who worked for both Yahoo and Tumblr — I am at a loss for words. And who’s this ‘source’ with this crazy quote? It just makes me start putting roles to people: Joffrey, Sansa — who the heck is Tyrion?!
Keep on shipping cool stuff, guys!
PS I love how this executive who shall not be name threw in the word “incredible” in there.
WTF happened to Tumblr’s logged out page?
Proportions of logo, copy and fields are all off. I’m hoping that this resulted from some hardcore funnel/metrics analysis. Otherwise it looked like marketing threw up on what was such a clean and elegant design.
Also - interesting to note that the copy is much more geared towards a mass market approach vs a ‘creators’ network. And who the fuck cares about ‘blogs’ in 2013?
“But David held firm. He wanted Tumblr to be a positive place on the Internet. The entire design of the service was with that in mind. There were loves (upvotes) but no downvotes. If you wanted to talk about someone’s post, you had to reblog it to your tumblog and then add whatever you wanted to say. David thought that would eliminate trolling.”
pieratt:
These days, I’m shooting almost exclusively with the iPhone. I only bring out the DSLR when I need a telephoto lens, like if I see a bear cub. I’ve always tried to keep photography feeling like a hobby, and the iPhone keeps it that way. I can shoot an image and have it processed in 30 seconds with one hand. I’d rather be out exploring than sifting through gigs of images on a computer screen. (via
VSCO Cam x Kevin Russ | vsco.co)
VSCO Cam x Kevin Russ | vsco.co
Unbelievable
/via @bijan
I love the idea of technology enabling us to live more vs distracting us to edit, curate, consume more digital cruft.
Also, the idea of sifting through photos is something that’s a pain point for me, too. And something I’m hoping to tackle soon. BTW - love the VSCO app.
“Lets start off with a simple proposition: innovation is not the same as invention. Invention is creating a new product or service. Innovation is transforming that product into something that’s useful enough and accessible enough to change people’s lives… The most successful innovators are magpies, taking concepts from many different places and putting them together in new ways. They do more than invent. They identify systems in which their inventions can flourish, and of those systems don’t exist they create.”
James Surowiecki
The best definition of innovation we’ve read. (via The New Yorker The Next New Thing)
Obvious prediction: Tumblr and Flipboard will start to meet in a middle ground at some point as their product converges. Both are social content experiences based heavily on curation as the juice around engagement. The interesting thing to me is that they’re approaching the same problem from quite different perspectives.
Let’s not forget Facebook, either.
#1 - I don’t think Rotate and Press & tap are really everyday gestures for people.
#2 - Is Pull a different enough experience to warrant separation from Drag?
#3 - I hope that we will find better ways to interact with technology than through our index finger.. one day.
Jessica in the middle of one of her interviews with a Tumblr creator.
I’ve always wanted to be a journalist - and after middle school daydreams and college writing courses and a brief stint as a wannabe travel writer in 2006, I realized what a tough business it was and quit.
But my love for the craft of long-form journalism stuck, and in the last year, the rise of editorial teams within large tech platforms heralded a possible new age where original content and user-generated content could have co-existed. Twitter Stories, Facebook Stories and Tumblr Storyboard all tried to mine what their communities were doing.
Except Tumblr was different. More than just a mouthpiece that relayed how these platforms made users lives better, Storyboard had bonafide journalistic credentials: they were reporting on what people were doing creatively and were not just marketing case studies.
And Storyboard exemplified — perhaps in a vaccum of 2012 — how Tumblr thought of itself: not just as a technology platform, not just a user-generated content community, but in interviews and logo design and pitches and blog posts, as a place for creators. Tumblr always aspired to be the intersection between tech and liberal arts, using a well-designed technological foundation to spur humanity’s creative output. It’s that ambitious. It’s one of the reasons I loved being part of the team. More than just a platform for self-expression, Tumblr wanted to be a platform for creativity.
Read more
“I’ve seemed to move away from taking a cohesive set of photographs, which is something I’ve noticed ever since I stopped regularly posting to Flickr. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my friend … not about photography, but music—particularly, the dying concept of the album… these days, we may download a single track, unaware of or uninterested in an entire album. I show a similar disinterest in my photography. Process and context are increasingly less significant. I’m preoccupied instead with creating the perfect shot for any given moment—worthy of an avatar, of a Facebook cover photo—and discarding the rest. A single unit is easier and faster to create—and consume.”
parislemon:
Great, long profile of Jason Goldman, the former head of product at Twitter who is now at Branch, by Rob Fishman of BuzzFeed FWD. Without question, Goldman is someone who has not gotten enough credit over the years given everything he’s been deeply involved in.
Nice profile on a tech personality that does the grunt work, builds awesome stuff, and leaves the spotlight to others. Kind of a role model for me!
“I wade through content and stories, sending links to Read Later, following blogs, creating different-colored Stickies on my desktop, and making fragments of notes in Evernote. The insides of my Evernote account? Oh my. It’s scary hunting in there: those are the half-thoughts and ideas in my brain — and the bits of data and links I’ve collected to support them — all laid out, in a digital filing system of notebooks.”
On (Un)organized Consumption | Writing Through the Fog
Really worth the read from Cheri Rowlands on how she deals with the deluge of content, media, to-do’s and expectations in our tech-saturated world. It’s a topic that’s dear to me: the relentless focus on the now and ‘what’s next’; the absence of care that our favorite tech products give towards the things that have been created and consumed in the past — or perhaps the things that have been displayed but never really acknowledged — before the next wave of news and memes come along.
I believe that we’re at the cusp of understanding and parsing the data that comes at us each day. The revolution of the web gave rise to a new breed of creators — we all can be makers of content and stories and data — but the revolution isn’t complete, because the other side of the equation, how we are wired to make sense of and group and understand this exponential increase in information volume, how we can analyze the data more effectively, has largely been ignored.
In some ways (shameless plug), the ideas we’re toying with at Imagist reflect my wrestling with this idea: that there’s more to information than the baubles of “what’s new” and the ADD tendency to reflexively consume bits of information that’s no better for our brains than junk food is for our waistlines.
thisistheverge:
Flipboard 2.0 refreshes app’s look, now lets everyone run their own magazine (hands-on)
Flipboard announced today that it has 50 million users, and also released a new version of its app that lets everyone become an editor-in-chief. Flipboard 2.0 is “the most epic release we’ve ever done,” CEO Mike McCue told The Verge, and most of its new features focus on curation: users can now “flip stories,” in the app or in a browser via a bookmarklet, into their own magazines.
Exciting times. #mywiferocks
“‘Mobile search is just broken. Everyone in this goes to yelp and searches and each of us get the same result. That’s clearly a broken model because every one of us is going to do different things or have different favorites’ he said, highlighting that Foursquare’s focus is on personalized search, with result tailored to the user based on their previous information.”
High-res
