Have you ever used a Tumblr blog? Here’s mine. It still needs some work.
I’m always surprised at the number of people who’ve not even heard of the web service. To date, WordPress is still my platform of choice for traditional content blogging, but Tumblr is growing on me as a super powerful publishing tool. You can get one here if you’re curious.
Why is Tumblr cool?
First, it’s about shorter snippets of content. While Tumblr posts are not typically as short as tweets or other snippets of micro-blog content, the platform forces bloggers to keep things short, sweet and digestible. In my mind, the old adage applies: less is more.
The interface is attractive, well organized and uses attractive design. This all combined, makes publishing a variety of content types a simple and enjoyable experience. Everything from photos and video, to links and even short voice recordings is literally just one to two clicks away. And if you’re an iPhone user, the free Tumblr app rivals the quality of Tweetie 2 in terms of consistency, design and usability.
Where Tumblr Misses
Here’s some of the trade-offs. First, Tumblr is not as widely used as other more popular platforms like Blogger, TypePad, Worpress and a slew of others. Because of this, building subscribers is much more difficult.
Your content updates will display in a scroll fashion, similar to how status updates appear on your Facebook Wall. It also shares some properties with micro-blogs like tagging, trends and ease of following other peoples content. That means that if your are following other Tumblr blogs, foreign content will also live on your dashboard.
Finally, I’ve personally never stumbled over indexed pages from Tumblr blogs when I’m searching Google. I don’t know enough to say whether these posts get found by traditional search engines, but I’ve not yet seen it. If you have some info on that, please leave a comment. I’d love to know.
How To Make a Tumblr-Facebook Cocktail
What I like best about Tumblr is how easy it makes it to add rich media to my Facebook profile, especially from my iPhone. And while the Facebook app for iPhone was dramatically improved a few months back, it’s still clunky, slow to upload and crashes about half the time. Tumblr, however, gets the job done well. I was even able to fully integrate Facebook and my Tumblr blog using Safari on my iPhone.
Here’s how:
- Search for Tumblr on Facebook. You’ll bring up the fan page as well as the app.
- Go to the Tumblr application and drop in your blog’s url. It will look like this:
- Click Start importing this blog. You should see this wonderful box. Click Allow
- You know you’ve done it right when you see this:
And that’s it my friends. Your’re ready to rock and roll with super-easy Facebook publishing with a few added content integration features including video, text, links, images and even short audio files.
Want to make it event more powerful? Download some Tumblr apps. I use the browser bookmark-let and the iPhone app, and am trying out the dashboard widget. You can also add third party apps to your actual Tumblr blog.
Is this helpful? Think you might give Tumblr integration a try? Are you already using it? How’s it working for you?
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