How I Would Improve: Tumblr
Radar is cool; but what about some other things…
I am a big fan of Tumblr.com - a not-so-new web-based blogging platform that encourages brevity and interaction with other publishers on the site. It’s simple, addictive and works very well at bringing you new and interesting news, pics and links that are relevant to you.
That said, there are always improvements to be made. Many new ones were included in Tumblr’s recent upgrade which revamped the system in some very good ways.
Here are my quick suggestions for the next upgrade, Tumblr Version 4:
Proper Tagging
One of the new features was the ability to tag your posts with whatever you like. The only problem is that tagging doesn’t appear to do anything! You may tag to your heart’s content, but it won’t allow for any real organization or related linking.
I hope I’ve just missed something here and there really is a purpose in tagging. If so, please let us know; otherwise, just remove the option.
Channel Feeds
Also new is Tumblr’s Channels, which I love the idea of. Instead of only being able to post content to your own Tumblr site, you can instead post anything to a ‘channel’ - for instance, if you want to have a channel of only iPhone pictures, you can create your own iPhone Pics channel.
What’s the problem here? Well, the first is that there is no feeds for channels. You have feeds for your Tumblr, but not for any channels you create. This is very limiting. How nice would it be to create a completely new channel and feed it into something else?
Public Channels
The second issue with Tumblr channels is that they aren’t public. They are only viewable by other Tumblr users. You can invite other users to contribute content, which is awesome, but it will only be seen by Tumblr-ers.
Your channel page doesn’t actually live outside of Tumblr either, so you have to be logged in and using the Tumblr dashboard to check out channels. Again, this is limiting.
I understand this is good for developing particular content amongst a small group of publishers, but isn’t that what Tumblr does anyway?
Updating Reblogged Content
I thought it’d be a nice idea to not only update the Tumblr dashboard when a post is reblogged by other people, but also the original post. This way, when anyone is viewing a post, they can see the other responses from other Tumblr sites.
I think this will really enhance the community aspect and get more people reblogging with their own commentary, as opposed to just reposting content arbitrarily.
Comments even?
What about just adding comments to posts? I’m not exactly keen on this idea, particularly if the former suggestion is tried. Reblogging is nice and is a good way to make responses, and I think that should be improved before we go adding comments.
You can add a little hack to put Blogger-like comments on your page, but again, is Tumblr the place for that?
Reblogs vs Responses
One thing I’ve noticed using Tumblr is that some people just reblog other peoples posts, and some people add their own 2 cents - sometimes more than 2 cents.
My idea is to maybe have two options, reblogs and responses. This, again, can trickle into the comments debate, but a separation may be good. Reblog if you just want to post the original post on your site with the reblog linkback and Respond if you want to write a response to a post.
The response posts could not actually include any of the original post, unless quoted, and just the response.
That said, you can already do this by reblogging content and then just posting a Tumblr post on someone else’s post, as you would anything you post on Tumblr. It would just be nice to be able to do that within the Tumblr dashboard like you can reblog posts.
With-Friends Public List
Twitter.com has a very cool feature on everyone’s profile page that is a chronological list of their friends’ updates. This way you can see who your friends are following and if anything interesting is being said.
Why not add this to Tumblr with the same results? Soup.io already does this.
Notable Mentions:
More Feeds - currently limited to grab content from 5 feeds.
Podcast Compatibility - I’ve heard that podcast feeds don’t work well with Tumblr.
Permalink Support - instead of just .com/post/001010101 we could have .com/post/posttitle ?
Tumblr Search - I want to be able to search a site’s posts without using Google’s site: query.
Text-only Archive - the admittedly pretty Archive page for each site can take a long time to load. An option for text-only?
What are your suggestions to improve Tumblr, if you would improve it at all?
