Tag: tumblr

Matt Mullenweg is probably the ideal web company CEO

Automattic has been running for 17 years. The company is home to nearly two dozen brands and products powering or leveraging the web, including WordPress, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr.

When Automattic purchased Tumblr, they somehow managed to pay just $3 million from Verizon who got it as part of its acquisition of Yahoo. Tumblr was a billion dollar company at one point and since 2019 it belongs to a multibillion dollar company.

The transaction cost for us buying Tumblr was de minimis. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. Tumblr was, and still is, burning quite a bit of cash.

Matt said Automattic was prepared to pay $100 million but they managed to only spend $3 million. Sounds like a steal? Well, in the three years since the acquisition Tumblr was being cleaned up from the inside. 85% of the team joined after the acquisition and he’s had to reorganize the company to reassign staff because Tumblr has to downsize to 50-60 people to match their revenue before they can go up again.

From the interview it sounded like he didn’t let people go but reassigned them to the other products under Automattic.

Matt understands that the web is a decentralized network built on protocols. He also understands talent is also decentralized. Automattic allows its staff to work from anywhere and no longer has a physical office since shutting down its headquarters in 2017. Everyone who works at WordPress (even Matt) has to spend time handling customer support to understand their pain points.

Understanding what decentralized entails is core to Matt’s goals for the web. It’s why the idea of federating Tumblr and WordPress sites and pages and allow those sites and pages to be connected to join the federated network and become the social web is one of the company’s top priorities and when you run a social web company, content moderation is key.

I would say that it is about 20 percent pruning out the bad stuff as if you’re weeding a garden and about 80 percent encouraging the things that you want to grow. It definitely needs to be a long-term thing. You need to water it every day, but the results are going to happen over months or years.

Tumblr recently reopened itself to adult content but it’s doing so in a more careful and controlled manner to accommodate the needs of those working or with interest in the adult industry and those wishing to keep their neighborhood safe for children and acceptable at work.

Tumblr, WordPress, and Automattic may not be as glitzy and glamorous as other major web companies but more than 40% of websites run on WordPress today and they’re quietly marching towards 80% by embracing openness and decentralization.

When TechCrunch interviewed Matt as the new CEO of Automattic in 2014, he said, “The power of the web is not in centralization, it’s not in closed systems or anything like that. It’s in its open nature and that’s what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years”

I CAN’T EVEN!!

catedrals:

abguern:

thorsicle:

so i just spent the last twenty minutes reading over tumblr’s terms of agreement and i’m so glad i did

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so fucking sassy

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thnx tumblr ur such a good friend :’)

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fuckin

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so essentially yahoo made you their bitch

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dick

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…

Tumblr rules. LOL.

jickatrap:

Yahoo Meeting Minutes – 05.20.13 by Lee Crutchley | Quoteskine on Flickr.

Tumblr @ Yahoo: Day 1

chartier:

  • New purple dashboard option
  • All other dashboard color options are retired
  • By June 1, you will have to update your avatar to be one of those damn cartoon people things
  • All new post buttons (icon and background) are now purple
  • Every sentence you write will automatically get an exclamation point!
  • All exclamation points are now purple
  • Yahoo Mail gets a button to auto-post incoming messages to Tumblr
  • Tumblr’s mobile apps now automatically summarize all text posts so you don’t have to do all that damn reading
  • All photos are also summarized using auto-generated shadow puppet images with dramatic text captions to save on bandwidth costs
  • All posts have a chance to appear on the Yahoo.com front page. None of yours will

LOL

sigh

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Tumblr Search is Badly Broken

This is something that has been bugging me for ages. Despite having a search capability in both the dashboard and the blog page, it’s practically impossible to search for anything in your own Tumblr blog.

While the search drop down in the dashboard offers multiple options including searching through your own posts, it would almost always return zero results. Sometimes it would return posts that have been tagged accordingly but even then it’s never a complete set of results, many posts with relevant results would go missing.

Searching for a word or sentence that clearly is there within a particular post would never return that post in the results page.

If search is so difficult to implement for Tumblr, why not hand it over to Bing or Google? Tumblr should have a properly working content search ability. Categorization is one thing but often search is the best method to find content. If a search query for a particular text cannot find the relevant results even though they are actually there, then either don’t have it at all or outsource it to someone else.

Today Tumblr rolled out a completely rewritten iPhone app. Gone is the two panel interface replaced by a tabbed interface that’s becoming more and more common on recent iOS apps and at a glance would remind you of Instagram. The center tab is the primary activity tab for posting content with options to choose which Tumblr account to post it from.

The new app introduces post settings on the composition screen, accessible by swiping the screen to the right. While on the post settings page, swiping to the left takes you back to the composition page.

Due to the way iOS apps are traditionally designed, it’s very tempting to tap on the top left button on the screen where the back/return button is usually located, to go back to composing a post. You don’t want to do this as that position is used by a cancel button that thankfully prompts you with an option to save or clear the post instead of abandoning it outright.

On the settings page, Tumblr finally adds a custom tweet option so now tweets don’t need to come out looking like a mess.

Now that there’s a tab for Likes, you can look at all the posts that you’ve marked on Tumblr directly in the app without having to go to the website on a desktop, notebook, or tablet computer.

Tumblr now allows account creation right on the app as well as reading and replying to messages, recognizing the fact that having to go to the website to do all this is becoming tedious and that for a lot of people, the mobile device is the primary interface to the Internet.

Overall, the app is now much more comprehensive, more usable, and more practical with an interface that makes it easier for you to post more frequently to all the multiple Tumblr blogs that you may have.

Tumblr Pet Peeve

It bothers me that Tumblr forces you to go back to page one of your Dashboard to post stuff that’s not a reblog of what’s on that page. Why not have the post options on every page of the Dashboard? It can be on top, on the side, from a drop down menu, or whatever. After posting, it should have an option to send you back to where you were on your Dashboard before posting, to your post, or to the latest entries.

A workaround right now is to open page one on another tab and post from there but this way you’ll end up with two Dashboards, one with new entries already posted by others.

Surely this is something the designers at Tumblr have thought about but decided against. I wonder what their reason is.

thedailywhat:

Technical Difficulties of the Day: Tumblr has assured me that they are working to fix whatever is causing these connectivity issues that have been bringing the site down (though, interestingly enough, not Tumblr itself) repeatedly over the last few days.

In the meantime, feel free to freak out and wet yourself. I know that’s what I’ll be doing.

[image: danmeth.]

Source: danmeth.com