Popular blogging platform Tumblr has quietly introduced a minor, but notable new feature: a better way to find contacts through your other social networking services or Gmail. On the page available at Tumblr.com/lookup you can now connect your Gmail, Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to find all your friends’ Tumblr blogs.
Handy. Well, handy if you’re the one doing the looking, I suppose. As Buzzfeed’s community moderator Ryan Broderick hilariously tweeted, “Great, thanks to the new http://www.tumblr.com/lookup/ page all my friends will find my One Direction fanblog I moderate!”
Oh and yes they will, too. Because it appears that the option to remove yourself from social discovery is opt-out. While Tumblr doesn’t appear to have made an official announcement on this new feature yet (at least via the official Tumblr blog, that is), the company did tweet, err…re-tweet, about the addition yesterday. And today, responding to an outraged user via Twitter, the Tumblr account tweeted back “if you don’t want your Facebook or twitter linked, just uncheck the box in your settings.”
To be clear, Tumblr allowed users to look up contacts via email in the past, announcing way back in 2009 the option to search via Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or MSN. But the page for doing so (http://www.tumblr.com/lookup_contacts) now redirects to http://www.tumblr.com/lookup instead.
The feature appears to have rolled out last week, based on some early tweets, but we’ve reached out to Tumblr to confirm and will update with details when we hear back.
Below, some early reactions from Twitter:
@Naijca luckily, it only follows main blogs right…? right?! OR IS SOMEBODY GOING TO FOLLOW MY NSFWTUMBLR NOW
— Hampus Andersson (@HampusAndersson) May 31, 2012
Tumblr’s new lookup thing is great for finding abandoned tumblrs started by people you follow on twitter.
Tumblr’s new lookup thing is great for finding abandoned tumblrs started by people you follow on twitter.
— Sam Kelly (@skelly) May 31, 2012
— Phillipe Chatelain (@uptownvoice) May 25, 2012
New tumblr lookup has revealed some strange blogs, you guys are weird. I feel like I’m snooping at everyones dangly bits its so exposing!
— Jessica Straker (@jessicastraker) May 29, 2012
Wow lots of Twitter friends with inactive Tumblr accounts. tumblr.com/lookup
— ★ Nathaniel Daught (@NetworkShadow) May 30, 2012
| Oh, yay. You can now lookup people from Twitter/Facebook/Gmail on @Tumblr. #MoreStalking
— | نور العلي. (@Arabzy) May 30, 2012
Update: Tumblr’s official response
We have had this feature for sometime but it has previously been import email based. We have recently added Twitter and Facebook as options and they have proven to be incredibly popular. Any user can use this to find blogs that connect their account to Twitter/Facebook but it doesn’t require the user who is trying to discover new blogs to connect their account to their blog.
Yesterday we promoted this feature on the dashboard with a small call to action message below our posting icons. As we have added more subtle capabilities it’s important that we make sure our users are aware of them. When a user follows a blog, the blog is always notified via our internal notification system and if the blog owner chooses via email.
Helping users discover and connect with the right set of blogs delivers on our mission of ‘Following the World’s Creators’