microblog Archive

It appears microblogging service Tumblr is currently down. I’ve noticed over the past few days that a good number of the Tumblr blogs I’ve visited present me with the message seen below. The message doesn’t note that the service is in maintenance mode but the page title does note that Tumblr is in Maintenance Mode. The error message states, “We’ll be back shortly! We’re making some changes to our infrastructure and certain pages may be unavailable for a few minutes. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back shortly.”

The last time we reported on an outage at Tumblr was back in July. A search on Twitter for Tumblr shows some very upset users (some comments NSFW) about the outage. It’s important to remember that all online services will suffer from some unexpected downtime. I am sure the Tumblr team is working hard to get the service back to full network capacity. From what I can tell, Tumblr users use the most profanity when noting their reaction to the service being down or in maintenance mode.

The official Tumblr Twitter account has no mention about the current maintenance mode or downtime.

Update – Tumblr is back up! Start posting your photos asap!

Update 2 10:15pm Eastern – Tumblr is down again for maintenance.

Continue reading “Is Tumblr Down?” »

As the World Cup comes to a close (go Germany!), it appears Twitter missed the winning kick. We already know that Twitter is a marketing platform and they should have maximized the potential for users and for sponsors/advertisers.

My InformationWeek column takes a look at how Twitter missed their goal-den opportunity. And Twitter isn’t alone…third-party client services including Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Brizzly also missed the same opportunity to create a specific, integrated client for the World Cup.

Continue reading on InformationWeek »

For Edelman VP Steve Rubel, Posterous is the hottest thing out there today. Last summer Rubel talked about how Posterous changed how he looks at blogging.

Posterous is a simple way to create a blog by using email to create online content and store it for easy viewing and sharing. You send your photos, videos and text to Posterous and they make the posts on-the-fly for you. Your posts can then be shared on the social services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your readers can also subscribe to content on your Posterous blog using RSS or email. Posterous co-founder Gary Tan was recently interviewed on the This Week in Startups show hosted by Jason Calacanis.

Yesterday WordPress announced that they have created a “Posterous Importer” for hosted customers. Similar to their other importer tools, this new one takes the content on a Posterous blog and imports it into a wordpress.com hosted blog. The Posterous importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the post that WordPress can handle “post via email” which is the core functionality of Posterous.

Compete shows Posterous at 1 million unique U.S. visitors in January and WordPress at 27 million for the same demographics and time period. Last week WordPress added a new email subscription option to hosted blogs.

It seems the hot Twitter news of the day is that the service might be slowing in U.S. growth. You can read the Twitter stats story on Mashable and TheNextWeb. Earlier in the week the big news for the so-called social media experts was the on and off status of the new “retweet architecture system”. Twitter turned it on for many users (I was not one of them) but then turned it off so they could fix some bugs.

Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”.

This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps Twitter was. What really got me thinking was something I read on Patricia Handschiegel’s blog. While she discusses the way Twitter defined their service in the beginning, she uses the word forum throughout the column.

Continue reading “Let’s Watch Twitter Become FriendFeed” »

It appears that the microblog service Tumblr is currently down as of 6:15AM Eastern Time. From what we can tell, the service has been down for about an hour now. I can’t seem to find a status blog for Tumblr. Both the main site plus all of the users blogs are down.

A search on Twitter for Tumblr shows some very upset users (some comments NSFW) about the outage. We’ve sent inquiries to the Tumblr team for more information on whether this was a planned maintenance period or if the outage was caused by something else.

This is the first time that we’ve reported that Tumblr is out of service.

As always please report in if Tumblr is down where you are – either the main Tumblr site or your personal Tumblog.

Update: 6:45AM Eastern – Tumblr is back!

Related: Our Tumblr coverage including overview video from Tumblr founder David Karp.

Remember Friendfeed? The ultimate sharing service that was going to beat Twitter and reach the mainstream in a big way?

Web trending service Compete shows Friendfeed down nearly 30% in September with 750,000 U.S. unique visitors.  This is down from just over 1 million unique visitors in August 2009.

Former Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted this past weekend, “To be honest, Friendfeed doesn’t have the same appeal it used to post-FB acquisition. I’ll just cut my losses and use Facebook instead.” Robert Scoble, the most popular Friendfeed user, is now using Twitter’s favorites feature to share content. Consultant Louis Gray appears to be using Google Reader to share content he finds interesting. I am unsure if the actual Friendfeed interaction usage for Robert or Louis has dropped.

These days I find myself only loading Friendfeed a couple of times a day. The service seems to load and react slower than pre-acquisition. I receive nearly zero interaction on my shares, feed posts and comments. The ability to drum up a conversation certainly has diminished post-acquisition. Why is this? If the service wasn’t acquired, would the level of interaction still be high? It is interesting to look at how quickly the early adopters packed up their carriages and started the horses after the Facebook acquisition was announced.

Continue reading “Anyone Still Using Friendfeed?” »

NY-based microblog service Tumblr has been busy over the past month. They’ve launched reader submissions and photoset functionality. Today they have announced the launch of  ”TumblUpon”.

TumblUpon may sound very similar to another service, StumbleUpon and from what I can tell the basic functionality is the same. As you “like” posts on Tumblr, it learns about your likes and when you use the TumblUpon option, Tumblr will recommend other posts you may like.

TumblUpon uses a frame (grr!) to move from one Tumblr page to another. It allowed me to jump around even though I have never used the like function on Tumblr.

This is an important move by Tumblr as it will help keep readers inside of their network and will help with discovery, something I believe in strongly.

Mashable has additional thoughts on TumblUpon and some metrics that Tumblr will release today.