Will Tumblr be the Facebook to WordPress’ MySpace? – Technology on NBCNews.com.
Blogging may be so yesterday to cutting edge technorati and others who like to stay 10 years ahead of the curve, but it’s not going to die anytime soon and now, bloggers seem to be flocking faster to Tumblr than to WordPress.com. Does this signal the beginning of the end for WordPress? Will it go the way of MySpace, while Tumblr ascends to Facebook-like popularity?
As of this morning (Pacific time), Tumblr has more than 20.9 million blogs, while WordPress.com clocked in at a little over 20.8 million. But the volume of daily new content really tells the story: Tumblr posts numbered over 31.2 million today, while WordPress.com has yet to crack 500,000 posts.
I was one of those people who struggled to find a ‘home’ for my blogs. I have an account on Tumblr, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress.com, and a few other places. I eventually settled down to self-hosted WordPress.org. Primary reason? I need the sense of security that I will not lose everything I work hard for if one of these sites decided to shut themselves down.
Over the years I’ve grown with the internet. I’ve had countless experience where , after pouring countless hours to learn the platform, decide on what to do with it, and subsequently execute on the plan, only to have the site deteriorated, sometimes completely defunct’ed. It’s rather frustrating.
Nowadays I keep everything on my own self-hosted servers. I keep an archive copy of everything, not just copies in the format I host, but raw sources that would allow me to reuse the material should I decide to make major conversation to something completely different. So in that sense I am neither a Tumblr nor a WordPress.com user.
I can definitely understand why Tumblr is gaining on popularity, though. The key to a successful blog is constantly updated contents. Even regurgitated contents are better than no updates. Tumblr seems to got this down pad. In addition to making short-n-quick updates super easy (which in terms meaning encouraging multiple contents on a daily basis), Tumblr facilitate many functionality that enables incorporating other people’s content into your own w/o violation of plagiarism. All these are key to a successful social-blogging environment.
I do like a lot of what Tumblr offers. For example, I think the Archives in Tumblr just kicks ass. I’ve searched all over the place for something like that with WordPress and came up empty. The closest I’ve found are Snazzy Archives and Grid Archives. However, neither gives the same level of coolness+usefulness as the Archives page offered in Tumblr. I’ve tried tinker with both plug-ins and eventually gave up. This is true for many things like Reblog, Like, Tag Cloud, etc.
Nonetheless, despite the preference in what Tumblr has to offer, self-host is more important to me than anything else. Therefore, I am stuck with WordPress.org. My dream would be a self-host Tumblr (or a WordPress.org that provides a lot of Tumblr features).
Keeping my eyes open at the next chapter of this book….