What Tumblr Should Do: #1 Follow Outsiders

I am inaugurating a new series here: What Tumblr Should Do. I am simply going to offer suggestions of things that the folks behind Tumblr should implement or change.

#1 Follow Outsiders

Tumblr has a large and growing community of users, but it doesn’t include everybody, and probably never will. There are many folks out there that I would like to follow, but since they aren’t using Tumblr I can’t just click a follow button to start having their posts magically appear in my Tumblr dashboard. But I would like to.

Yes, I know I can follow their RSS feed, or go back to their site periodically, or use any of a dozen other approaches. However, that’s annoying, since I want to experience these folks as if they were posting in Tumblr. I like the Tumblr experience as an active reader and curator: I want to be able to easily follow their insights in the Tumblr stream, and not have to wander around the web. It makes reposting easier and liking possible. And I deeply dislike the sterility of RSS readers: I don’t want to be an RSS readerer, I want to tumble.

Of course there are a list of issues that arise, but at the very least Tumblr could implement a first version by allowing me to add the RSS feed of an outside blog to a list of outsiders I want to follow. Tumblr could instrument things so that when those outsiders post and their RSS feeds are updated, the stories would be parsed and placed into my dashboard.

I think the most sensible way to do this — technically — would be to create a ‘ghost’ account for any outsider that any Tumblr user follows. If multiple Tumblr users want to follow the same outsider, there would be only a single update going on. And then all the reblogs, likes and follows could be associated with the ghost account.

At some point, someone with such a ghost account might opt to switch over, and claim the account, and perhaps abandoning their outside blog. Who knows? But I know I would benefit from this feature and so would other Tumblr users, even if it doesn’t necessarily swell the ranks at Tumblr.

Shouldn’t we open the doors and pull the wider world into Tumblr?

Update: 9:20am — @kthread answered ‘+1 I would definitely use this, and would in fact pay for it as a premium Tumblr service’

Update: 9:47am — @lelapin points out that Tumblr has a feature designed to allow import of RSS feeds. I recently tested that approach, and it just doesn’t work (see Fossilized Tumblr Feature: Importing Via RSS). Besides, if it did, it wouldn’t work as I wanted. And of course there is no economy of scale: if you and I and a 1000 others all import Umair Haque this way it would be 1002 separate RSS imports, and there would be no convergence of reblogs, likes, etc. No, it should be implemented inside Tumblr in an intentional way.