What Tumblr Should Do: #2 Fix Tag Editing

I wrote a long piece the other day — What Twitter Could Learn From Tumblr — praising the deep integration of tags in the Tumblr implementation. However, there is a fly in the ointment. The way that tags are edited is a UX mess.

Here’s the Tumblr editor, with the tag edit region to the right:

Tags for the associated post are not entered in the obvious way, as text delimited by commas, as most tool support tags do. Instead, Tumblr has an oddball convention for entering the tags.

First, you move your cursor to the editing region set aside for tags, and you click to select that region. Then you start typing a tag, say ‘cat’, and then you hit enter. Then the text is converted to one of these green box things, after which the tag text is not longer editable. If you misspell a tag you have to delete it and do it over again, which is annoying if your tag is something like ‘things to learn from carlos castenada’.

You can also end a tag by entering a comma, which sounds like a good idea if you imagine that you’d like to enter a series of tags all at once. Note that this is the way that the bookmarklet works: you enter a series of tags as “twitter, liquid media, social tools”. But in the Tumblr editor using the comma sort of works, if you type the comma and wait for Tumbler to recognize it. In that case, the comma works like a return. But if you merrily type along after entering the comma, strange things can happen. In my case I usually end up with a strange collection of tags, like “twitter, l” “iquid media, so’ “cial tools”. On approach that the team at Tumblr might take is simply ignore the comma during typing, and parse only after the return is hit.

But best would be to simply rethink the implementation, making it more user friendly. Especially reworking things so that tags are editable.

There is also a strange problem with tags: they can’t be selected. There is an ‘x’ in each tag box, which is one way that they can be deleted, but otherwise they can’t be selected, which just seems strange. Obviously, if tags are made editable, selection would have an obvious outcome: making the text area editable.

I hope that the nice folks at Tumblr carve out a little time from major UX changes — like the recent Dashboard overhaul — and put some thought into a redo of tag editing.

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.