A few weeks ago I opened a Tumblr account and created a property for affenstunde within that network. You might think I’m a little late to the Tumblr game, well, I’d played with Posterous and Tumblr before with some degree of anonymity, this time the intention was to try a real usecase. As a ‘Product Guy’ (god but I hate that casually tossed-off term) it behoves me to try every interesting service and app and see whether or not it works; what’s bad and what’s better; and just generally: why?
I thought that Tumblr might be an appropriate place to post things that are too short for a blog post and too long for a tweet – a place for the ephemeral fun stuff, sharing and comment, daft pictures and wild invective. There are some moments when micro-blogging falls short: I’ll tweet a link to something that I find interesting (yet trivial) and wish that I could write a few more accompanying words of explanation; or people get confused and assume that the act of sharing an item/opinon denotes approval rather than suprise, outrage or abject horror.
For a little while there Tumblr did the job. I wasn’t overly comfortable with sticking my content in someone else’s silo but enjoyed the simplicity and ease of use. Then, today, I read these words:
Words of wisdom cast down by Marco Arment, former CTO of Tumblr. Message received and understood.
I guess, like many folk, I had some grand idea that my domain should only be used for high falutin’ thought leadership, nothing less than 1,500 word masterpieces of incisive wit and insight should grace these pages. Guess I was wrong. Truth to tell ‘publish and be damned’ are far better watch words.
Image: found on a content farm via Google Images – true source unknown