November 15th, 2012

Gnip Now Serves Over 100B Social Activities Per Month, Takes Tumblr Partnership To Next Level

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Gnip is an interesting company. It might not be extremely sexy or one that gets a lot of attention in mainstream press, let alone tech blogs. But it’s one that provides data from social services for a cost. For example, Gnip is a partner with Twitter in sharing its firehose of data for customers who want to know what people are saying about their brand or company. → Read More

November 7th, 2012

Tumblr Updates Its iOS App To Be “Completely Native,” Features Redesigned Dashboard, Notifications And Gestures

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Tumblr, the micro-blogging service that allows everyone to be a creative publisher, has updated its iOS app to become faster and more engaging. Tumblr says it’s “completely native.”

By “native,” the company means that the app feels faster and more integrated into your iOS experience. After a few minutes of playing with it, I can tell you that the company has backed up its claims in every sense… → Read More

November 5th, 2012

With Mobile Impressions, Tumblr Pushes Past 20 Billion Pageviews A Month

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David Karp, the CEO of New York-based Tumblr, revealed some fresh stats about the micro-blogging platform’s growth today. The company is seeing 20 billion pageviews a month, up from 15 billion at the beginning of the year, Karp said at GigaOm’s Roadmap conference in San Francisco today. That’s a growth rate of more than 30 percent per year. Compare that to 13 billion pageviews a month in→ Read More

October 26th, 2012

Google App Engine Back Up After Major Service Disruption – Dropbox and Tumblr Also Suffer

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Google App Engine is down with a major service disruption affecting thousands of customers around the world that use the platform-as-a-service.

The Google  Engine team posted the following update: → Read More

October 11th, 2012

Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS App

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Tumblr is a company that has built a platform that seemingly morphs every single time I visit it. One of the most popular features of the service is its ability to share photos, and then of course watch them spread throughout the network quickly.

Today, Tumblr announced a new standalone photo-sharing app called “Photoset”, which allows you to group some pictures together, share them on a web… → Read More

September 5th, 2012

Tumblr Runs Into “Networking Issue” That Affects Subset Of Custom Domain Blogs (UPDATED)

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If you use Tumblr to host a blog with a custom domain name, you might notice that it’s not functioning properly. That’s apparently the case for companies like Airtime, Pinterest and Path, as I’ve come to find.

I reached out to Tumblr and received the following response. → Read More

September 5th, 2012

Tumblr Redesigns Default Mobile Layout To Focus On Sharing And Images

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Tumblr today revealed a new and hopefully improved design for its default handling of mobile device blog rendering. It’s a clean layout that brings liking and re-blogging to the main page, as well as sharing via Facebook, Twitter and email. Mobile sites also now support Pages, Tumblr’s more permanent locations for stuff like “About Me” sections that live outside of the main feed, and two darlings… → Read More

August 31st, 2012

Cinemagraphs (Animated Gifs) As Ads? Tumblr Experiments With New Advertising Format

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GIF, a filetype that celebrated its 25th anniversary this past June (don’t you feel old now?), won’t die. And the animated GIF, in particular, has seen a notable resurgence recently, as a newer, younger group of netizens rediscover its capabilities, posting GIFs to social networks, blogs and in fashion editorials. “Cinemagraph“-making apps became trendy, and Tumblr posts filled with animated GIFs… → Read More

August 22nd, 2012

Tumblr ‘Truly Disappointed’ That Twitter Revoked Its Friend-Finding Privileges

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Twitter isn’t done with its efforts to take tighter control of its API — now Tumblr users can no longer search for their Twitter friends when they sign up on the microblogging service.

Twitter did the same thing to Instagram last month. And last week, it announced new restrictions to its API, which will make things especially tough for developers building consumer apps that compete with→ Read More

August 20th, 2012

Is Tumblr Quietly Cracking Down On Porn? Two Deleted Sites Say Yes [Update: Tumblr Says No]

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At 69.4 million blogs and nearly 30 billion posts to date, the rush of growth at blogging site Tumblr has for years had a seedy undercurrent: the popular site is home to a long tail of raunchy, NSFW adult content. But now, a few signs are pointing to the company cracking down on it, with the sudden deletion of several popular porn blogs within a short space of time.

Update: Tumbler says that… → Read More

June 21st, 2012

Better, Stronger, Faster: Tumblr 3.0 For iPhone Has Arrived

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Ah, there’s nothing like the sweet smell of highly-anticipated app updates in the morning. As CEO David Karp promised at last week’s F.ounders conference, the new version of Tumblr’s iOS app has now arrived. And it’s a doozy. (I mean that in a very good way). The app is completely redesigned, a lot faster, and offers a ton of new features ranging from Spotify support to gesture-based… → Read More

May 2nd, 2012

Tumblr Finally Wants To Make Some Money, Launches Its First Ads

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Tumblr, the immensely popular but profitless blogging platform, just turned on its first set of paid “sponsor products” (Tumblr doesn’t like to call them “ads”). Even though the company resisted running ads on its network for a long time, it announced that it would launch this platform about two weeks ago at Ad Age’s Digital Conference in New York. For the most part, the new ads don’t intrude on… → Read More

March 1st, 2012

Tumblr On Its Self-Harm Blog Ban: Support Is OK, Glorification Is Not

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Tumblr is clarifying its sticky position regarding the new policy to ban certain blogs from its network. You may remember last week, when the company took the bold stance that blogs promoting self-harm, including anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation and suicide, would no longer be allowed on its network.

Today, the company is following up on the policy change to explain that it’s not banning… → Read More

February 3rd, 2012

Tumblr Now Lets You Highlight Your Favorite Posts For A Dollar

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Tumblr is introducing a new feature today that lets its users pay a dollar in order to have their post featured on the Tumblr Dashboard. The option is called “Highlights,” and it’s now available right from the new post page on Tumblr. With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important. → Read More

January 5th, 2012

Announcing The 2011 Crunchies Finalists And Tickets On Sale Now

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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks… → Read More

December 12th, 2011

Lightbox App Debuts New Photo Journal: It’s A Lazy Man’s Tumblr

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Lightbox, the beautifully designed social photo app for Android backed by $1.2 million in seed funding from Index, Accel, SV Angel, 500 Startups, and others, is today launching a revamped web interface that’s like a lazy man’s Tumblr. As with the hot blogging startup Tumblr, the idea with Lightbox’s new photo journal feature is to provide a stream of updates others can follow, share, like and… → Read More

October 31st, 2011

Tumblr Acknowledges Its Growing Spam Problem, Says It’s Doing Everything It Can

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Is Tumblr facing a growing spam problem? For many regular users of the blogging platform, the answer is “yes.” Although Tumblr hasn’t taken to its own blog to provide a public update on its progress in fighting spam, it did recently address the concerns of a high-profile Tumblr user – the associate producer of NPR’s Fresh Air, Melody Kramer, who maintains a blog for the popular program hosted on… → Read More

October 24th, 2011

Obama 2012 Campaign Turns To Tumblr For “Huge Collaborative Storytelling Effort”

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President Obama has added a new web service to his repertoire: Tumblr, the hot blogging service that just raised another $85 million in funding. You can find the new blog right here.

The site was set up by the 2012 Obama/Biden campaign, which also runs his Facebook page and Twitter account (The White House also recently launched an account on Foursquare). → Read More

September 26th, 2011

Tumblr Raises $85 Million Round From Richard Branson, VCs

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Blogging community operator Tumblr has raised $85 million in new funding from Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Richard Branson also participated in the round.

The news was broken moments ago by the NYT’s Jenna Wortham, who writes that the company will announce the financing later today. → Read More

September 9th, 2011

In One Year, Tumblr Goes From 1 Billion Posts To 10 Billion

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This morning, I logged into Tumblr (where I run my personal blog) and saw confetti flying everywhere on the screen. Was Tumblr hacked? Were they converting the platform to be Geocities-powered complete with animated GIFs? No, they were celebrating. They just hit 10 billion posts across the network.

The numbers are staggering. It was only a year ago that they hit 1 billion posts. Since then… → Read More

July 28th, 2011

TC Cribs: Inside Tumblr’s Reblog-Worthy Digs

We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, and this one is sure is sure to be a crowd pleaser: red-hot blogging platform Tumblr. The NYC-based startup has been growing like crazy (they’re now up to 11.6 billion page views per month), and they’ve given us a chance to take a peek inside their headquarters.

For a company with over $40 million in funding the Tumblr team is still surprisingly… → Read More

July 11th, 2011

How To Build An Audience On The Internet: The Kevin Rose School Vs. The Fred Wilson School

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Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace.

What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?

Blogging or “self-publishing” in any form was supposed to democratize and revolutionize the media industry. Content creators no longer needed mainstream platforms to get their voices heard. Bloggers weren’t… → Read More

July 8th, 2011

LinkedIn Surpasses Myspace For U.S. Visitors To Become No. 2 Social Network; Twitter Not Far Behind

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully… → Read More

June 29th, 2011

Get Posting With Gorgeous New Tumblr iPhone App

If you are part of the Tumblr Nation, and a growing number of you are, then you will want to download Tumblr’s new iPhone app, redesigned from the ground up with a new interface. It loads up your Tumblr Dashboard stream, but the post button brings up six simple icons for each post type: text, photo, link, quote, audio, and video.And then, of course, you can post photos or videos right from your… → Read More

June 27th, 2011

A Massive Solar Flare Of Activity Pushes Tumblr To 400 Million Pageviews A Day

Last month, founder David Karp noted that Tumblr was now seeing over 250 million pageviews a day. As we noted, that was incredible since as recently as July of 2009, they were seeing 250 million pageviews for the entire month. But it turns out that the numbers are much more incredible than they first appeared.

I noticed this when Tumblr President John Maloney posted earlier today that Tumblr was… → Read More

June 10th, 2011

Tumblr's New Messaging System: Another Way To Avoid My Evil Email Inbox

I hate email. Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate email. There’s just too much of it. It’s always flowing in. It never stops. And it’s getting worse.

As time goes on, even if inbox overload isn’t a problem for you right now, it will be. And I’m increasingly convinced that there is no actual solution. A ton of people are out there working on the problem — companies both big and small. Some… → Read More

May 25th, 2011

Tumblr Revamps 'Directory' To Better Surface Great Content (Video)

Exclusive – In a conversation with TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid after his panel on scaling fast-growing Internet businesses, Tumblr CEO David Karp talks not only about his lazy dog but also some new product developments that should be going live right about now.

In short, Tumblr has given Directory, where people looking for great content on the network have had the chance to find their fix for→ Read More

May 17th, 2011

All Of July 2009: Tumblr Did 250 Million Pageviews. May 16, 2011: Tumblr Did… 250 Million Pageviews

Two years ago, Tumblr founder David Karp shared some impressive numbers. In July 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million pageviews, and 650,000 new posts per day. A year later, we noted that they were “on fire” with 6 million users and 1.5 billion pageviews. If that was being on fire, it’s hard to know how to describe them now.

On their staff blog, Karp has just shared that Tumblr did… → Read More

May 16th, 2011

New York Reveals Plan To Become America's Next Top Digital City

Through new official partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, and NY-based startups Foursquare and Tumblr, New York aims to become America’s next, top digital city.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the city’s first, chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, presented their Road Map for the Digital City, today.

Before formulating the plan, Sterne led a comprehensive 90-day review of the city’s… → Read More

May 9th, 2011

Tumblr Launches 'Share On Tumblr' Button For Publishers

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and even Google, blogging platform Tumblr has released its ‘Share On Tumblr’ button, which allows publishers to add a button encouraging users to share their content on Tumblr (just paste the javascript tag into your source code).

The basic behavior of the button is simple enough, but the advanced features are where the ‘Share on Tumblr’ → Read More