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.

Trying To Capture A ‘Conversation’ On Twitter

@emergentfutures and @futureamb are discussing how they might capture a conversation — about the downsizing of American cities — using Tumblr’s reblog mechanism:

Emergent Futures Tumblelog | Multiple Re-Blogging as a Conversation - Should we do it?

futuramb (P A Martin Börjesson) and I have been reblogging a single post on the down sizing of American cities in a way that creates a conversation.

We can easily have that conversation off-line from Tumblr and we are concerned that doing it this way will confuse or annoy people who follow us.

You the reader can help us make that decision

Should we have Tumblr conversations in this way?

If we do should there be a limit to the number of reblogs - say three each?

My response:

You have bumped into a limitation of the Tumblr platform.

Karp et al decided early on not to support comments, even though a large number of Tumblr users include them via Disqus. Instead of excluding comment-style conversation, Tumblr could have been innovating, so that forms of iteration of the sort you are discussing could have been invented.

For example, imagine an extension or variant to the chat post, which is now hardly used, and is a minor recast of text posts. Instead, what if an author could create a group chat post, and invite other authors to be contributors. In this way, you and @futuramb could have a dialog, with whatever sort of interaction you wanted, and we could have watched that grow.

Again, if Karp had opted to implement comments as a first class sort of Tumblr object — like other sorts of posts — integrated comments could conceivably be associated with specific chat ‘strokes’. So in this fictional future Tumblr world, I would be able to make a comment on a remark of your and another on a remark of @futuramb’s, all within the same group chat.

But none of this is possible at present, alas.

Given the limitations of the blog/reblog/reblog paradigm — ugly styling, multiple posts, etc — I wouldn’t suggest that option for a long conversation of perhaps tens of interchanges between you two. Even if you limit the number of reblogs, it will be a mess.

Another option: Have a series of conversations on video, and transcribe each discussion into chat posts.

I didn’t touch on ‘Asks’ — another specific sort of Tumblr conversation, but they are also inadequate for a freeform, give-and-take sort of conversation, too.