Should Tumblr stay simple or does it need to grow up?

Tumblr is no longer just the home of reblogged pictures, quotes, music, videos, and journal entries of friends you follow; it’s also gaining favor with the more discerning content creators in the design and technology circles, turning it into a truly professional publishing platform. This phenomenon is thanks to its relatively easy customization while keeping its interface decidedly simple.

My question is, if Tumblr’s audience is becoming more mature, should it shift from its dead-simple appeal and grow up too? David Yeiser prefers its current approach:

What’s neat about Tumblr is it’s not only a great publishing platform but a great tool for content consumption. [...] as self-publishing has changed to shorter forms and varied media the traditional feed reader has become obsolete. I shouldn’t have to click a title of a post to read a quote. [...] I think the way Tumblr aggregates and displays blog posts is the future of feed readers. Though I’m not aware of any standalone readers that take this approach.

Personally, I disagree. I follow a lot of people (and non-people) on Tumblr, producing remarkably varied content genres (e.g. XKCD Explained, 53 Weeks of UX, Sweet Home Style) with no way of filtering which ones I’d like to view at a time. Infinite scrolling in the dashboard can only take you so far in browsing ease.

Unwieldy content consumption is a familiar problem experienced on Twitter and Facebook, and by people who want more options, more control. Except there are now methods of dealing them on those sites. It’s even a big business for third party companies. On Tumblr, that remains to be seen.

Dashboard filtering options would be a welcome addition to the site. The reason is that “following” is a one-size-fits-all option when the truth is we need many.

And there lies the rub with a hosted platform, as well as platform that caters to simplicity first and foremost. Notice that as the concept of feed reading, trackbacking, and commenting are abstracted, if not replaced with Tumblr’s own conventions of dashboard reading, reblogging, liking, answering, one is forced to adhere to a closed set of standards inside its community. For a community that’s got such a wealth of content, consuming and sharing and communicating through that content but with limiting, non-standard methods is a turn off. If I link to a Tumblr post from a non-Tumblr site, will the owner of that tumblelog even know that I did?

Again, all of this wouldn’t be so bad if there were more options available, even as premium features. Right now, there aren’t.

What should Tumblr do? Should it go the WordPress.org and Identi.ca route and provide an open, self-hosted platform? Should it take some notes from the old-but-still-strong LiveJournal? (In some ways their user bases are the same.) Should it push its API more aggressively? Should we just wait and see what they’re up to, or accept that it’s really just a different culture from what we’re accustomed to?

As someone who’s enjoyed a lot of great content on Tumblr and is tempted to migrate her personal blog over there, there are a glaring number of things holding me back.

RSS goes real-time; is not dead

Here’s another technology being given the Real Time Web treatment: RSS. There’s PubSubHubbub (PuSH), created by the mother of all search engines and there’s rssCloud, created by the father of RSS. You can tell just by the people behind both projects that this is a Big Deal.

I won’t get into the technical details—mostly because I can’t—but these two protocols are built on the same idea of push notifications instead of pull, which is the current setup. Feed aggregators won’t have to check every now and then for any updates; they’ll come right in when they’re published.

The score seems to be in PubSubHubbub’s favor right now, and it certainly calls attenion based on name alone. But Dave Winer had the idea as early as 2001. And who knows what will happen in the next few months.

What matters is the feed reading system is getting a much needed upgrade especially with all this talk of it being dead. RSS? Dead?

Like Bwana, I scoff at people who run through the streets proclaiming “RSS is dead! Long live Twitter!” Aside from the obvious non-parallel comparison between a protocol and a web app, he explains it nicely:

Those who claim RSS is dead don’t realize their newfound love for Twitter would be moot if it were not for RSS. Breaking news on Twitter comes from two main sources in my mind: websites and personal experience. For tech news, I doubt there is much personal experience for news unless there’s a conference or an event. Most juicy, 0-day news comes from websites. These websites often have a… wait for it… RSS feed. The race to post tech news first on Twitter usually stems from who can refresh their RSS reader the fastest.

So here’s to RSS: I’m not sure what the Web would do without you. Pretty sure that’s how many feel about Twitter too, but let’s talk again when it goes from webapp/API level down to the protocol level. And when it scales properly, of course.

Postscript: Both PuSH and rssCloud support Atom. RSS and Atom are both feed delivery mechanisms, but you won’t see people yelling “feeds are dead!” or “Atom is dead!”, as they have ignored any distinctions among the three for ages now. So for the sake of simplicity I mentioned only RSS above.