Yesterday, we noted that during a recent interview in Los Angeles, singer John Mayer shared his thoughts about why Twitter was “over.” Today, on his Tumblr blog (appropriately titled One Forty Plus), he clarified a bit.
In his post entitled, “Twitter Isn’t “Over”, I’m Over It,” Mayer talks about how the over-abundance of tiny amounts (140 characters) of information on Twitter is a limitation of the service. That line of thinking has been around ever since Twitter’s launch a few years ago, so nothing groundbreaking there. He does, however, make a pretty decent point, “Finding out in 140 characters what a stranger has to say about you is like a mathematical equation without an established value of ‘x’. Who are you, stranger?“
But much more interesting is what Mayer does next. He gives a huge, wet kiss to another micro-blogging service: Tumblr.
“This is where Tumblr comes in. It’s the future of social networking if your image of the future features intelligent discourse. I love reading other Tumblr users replies, because they’re thoughtful by virtue of the fact that if they’re not, they’ll bring the intellectual property value of their own blog down, and that’s a commodity on Tumblr,” he writes.
And Mayer goes on, “This post is an experiment in itself. If you want to communicate me, open a Tumblr account, follow me, repost my blog and then add to it. I’ll follow you back. Agree or disagree, lionize or demonize, but for God’s sake, be original. You’ll have all the room in the world to do it now.”
Damn. That’s the type of endorsement you can’t pay for.
And Tumblr knows it. Founder David Karp responded via his Tumblr blog with, “After three years at this, I can’t begin to describe the feeling of having this philosophy — the reason Tumblr will never feature a legacy comment system — described so perfectly. I love you, John.“
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
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