Twitter API and Microblogging: What About Tumblebacks?

Like Fred Wilson and Dave Winer, I am extremely excited about the moves by Tumblr and Wordpress to leverage the Twitter API as a way to get tumbleblogging into Twitter clients.

Tumblr’s David Karp explains on the Tumblr blog:

Inspired by Wordpress’ seriously clever use of Loren Brichter’s new Tweetie options, we’re launching our own Tweetie and Twitterrific compatible API. This Twitter-like API should make it easy for a lot of existing Twitter clients to start supporting Tumblr.

The really cool thing - because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging


• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary


• Favoriting = Liking


• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”


• Conversations = Reblogs

To try out Tumblr in Tweetie 2, tap “Accounts” → “+” → enter your username and password → tap the gear icon → enter “http://tumblr.com/” in both fields.

For Twitterrific, tap ”Sources” → “Edit” → “Add a New Account” → enter your username and password → tap ”Advanced” → set “Base URL” to “http://tumblr.com/” and disable “SSL”.

via staff.tumblr.com

I confess I am more drawn to the Tumblr example since I maintain a number of active Tumblr blogs. I will leave aside the tactical issues of that integration for another post, one probably only interesting to Tumblr heads. For this post I want to focus on the ups and downs of this use of the Twitter API.

Karp’s handwave equivalences in the post, where he equates ‘@david’ and ‘http://david.tumblr.com’, conceal a host of real semantic differences in the various platforms involved in this seeming convergence of many sorts of ‘microblogging’. As just one example, David Karp is ‘david.tumblr.com’ at Tumblr, but not ‘@david’ on Twitter (David Noël, in Germany). But that’s not central.

What is central to this discussion is the differences in tumbling and twittering. The two systems share (for all intents and purposes) the open follower model, where any user can opt to follow any other. (One caveat is blocking followers, but leave that to one side as a nit.)

There is also a loose equivalence between reposting and retweeting, which was more tight before Twitter reworked the semantics of retweeting. (Note that the adoption of Twitter fundamentals as the basis of a trans-microblogging suite of social conventions suggests a new reason for Twitter to not fool with semantics of core operations, like reposting/retweeting. But I will leave the Retweet Fail controversy to one side, too.)

But some social gestures and other semantics don’t equate nicely across the tumbleblog/Twitter divide. For example:

• Tumblr is a typed blogging system, where quotes, images, videos, audio, and text posts are distinct, and have different capabilities integrated into the user experience for authors and readers. It is the richness of media types and there supports that makes Tumblr (and its competitors) so interesting and engrossing an experience. And they can be arbitrarily long: not limited to 140 characters. Twitter has only one type of tweet, which are all limited to 140 characters. To the extent that Twitter supports media objects, it does so through URLs referencing images, audio, and other media objects. So in a sense, Tumblr has a tighter integration with media, while Twitter’s is very loose.


• Tumblr provides explicit history of social gestures — such as ‘likes’ and reposts — for every post. These appear in a user’s stream like other posts. So if you were to ‘like’ a post of mine on Tumblr, I would see that and other social gestures in my stream, and when users append new text to repostings I would see those as a sort of comment in those messages. (PS An interesting model for Twitter to look at instead of their new approach to Retweet, by the way.)

What I have proposed is a new convention, called Tumblebacks, which would require extension made to these companies APIs, so that cross-following, cross-streaming, cross-posting, and cross-gestures would be supported.

But these issues aside, there seems to be a real possibility of a mashed up mixed up world, based on tumbleblogging platforms leveraging the Twitter API.

But there is a hidden problem. All of these systems are unintegrated.

I recently wrote a post calling for a cross integration of the user experience of tumbleblogging platforms, and not I can include Twitter, as well.

Here’s the issue: I can’t follow a Typepad blogger (or blog, more correctly) inside of Tumblr, or vice versa. I have to login to two different systems, and interoperability is manual, at the best. I have to manually cut and paste stuff from Michael Sippey’s Typepad-hosted blog into my Tumblr-hosted Underpaid Genius blog. And I have two different sets of followers and people that I follow in Tumblr and Typepad. Oh, and in Twitter, too.

This is analogous to the wonderful world of instant messaging, where AIM, Yahoo, and MSN have fought for years to not support a general protocol for instant messaging interconnection. At one time telephone companies would not allow calls to people outside their own network, either, and the US Government gave a monopoly to Bell to solve that mess.

What I have proposed is a new convention, called Tumblebacks, which would require extension made to these companies APIs, so that cross-following, cross-streaming, cross-posting, and cross-gestures would be supported. For a detailed discussion of the proposed convention, see here.

Various companies — Six Apart, Postling, Soup.io, and others — have expressed an interest in discussing this convention, and seeing where it would lead. One contact at Posterous — I can’t find the tweet — expressed puzzlement about the idea, and said they weren’t a microblogging company. He said something like ‘We’re a real blogging company,’ or the like.

Tumblr’s John Maloney and I have had an email exchange about the Tumblebacks Convention, but he seems to think that these other companies are principally or only interested in getting their hooks into the large and growing community of Tumblr users.

[Update: John Maloney emailed today (18 Dec) following this post to say he was only making a wisecrack, and he and his team are going to take a long look at Tumblebacks and circle back with an official response.]

However, my interest is on behalf of users, like me, who are decidedly not better off in a divided world.

We, the users of all these products, which form the paving stones of our shared online city, we would be better off with Tumblebacks implemented.

The vendors of Twitter and tumbleblog clients — like Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Blogo, and Twitterific — may be the place where will see Tumblebacks first implemented.

Imagine this scenario:

• I am logged into a future client, say Tweetie 3, where I have connected to my Twitter, Typepad and Tumblr accounts. I have a single stream of tweets, microblog posts, and social gestures — retweets, reposts, likes — all presented in a consistent fashion.


• I can opt to repost a story from Michael Sippey’s Typepad stream to my Tumblr blog, and Typepad records the repost on that story. (Note that in this case, the reposted story on my Tumblr blog has to gain the list of social gestures from Typepad, which is where that list would be maintained.)


• Or I decide to tweet out a link to that post via Twitter, and that would be similarly recorded on the Typepad post, without recourse to third party commenting solutions like JS-Kit’s Echo or Disqus’ Mentions.

Most important, the user experience for both me as an active tumbler and twitterer is consistent and intuitive, and the experience of those who are approaching this outside the stream — a casual visitor to Michael Sippey’s blog, for example — displays the full richness of the interaction going on, with reposts, likes, and other social gestures displayed on the individual posts (and tweets?).

So I guess this latest chapter is an indication of things to come. Two clients developers, Tweetie and Twitterific, create a way to do something cool, that makes the user experience richer and better, and the vendors start to move in a great direction. But we also need a strategic vision, not just tactical advances. And Tumblebacks — to be implemented in the broadest general manner — will require strategic alignment from all the microblogging companies, and we will be the final beneficiaries of their commitment.