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.

As always please report in if Tumblr or your Tumbleblog is down for you and your location and what you plan to do to occupy your time.

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

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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 »

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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.

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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.

Could Twitter be moving towards “threaded conversations” similar to what a forum offers? We know that the new retweet functionality will keep everyone’s “like” below the master/initial comment. We also know users want a way to add their own thoughts to the initial comment. Could the threaded conversation mechanism be a way to please both groups? Just like what any forum offers today. And just like the way Friendfeed and Facebook handle the conversation today.

All of this leads me back to the dip in usage. Forums are very sticky because the conversation is centralized and everyone wants “in”. As I’ve written about until my fingers fall off, the conversation is currently so fragmented on Twitter. If Twitter continues to move towards full-Friendfeed, it could mean increased usage.

Find more stories about: Facebook, FriendFeed, microblog, Twitter

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.

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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.

Twittercism provides additional analysis and metrics for Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook.  

Edelman VP Steve Rubel noted that blogging service Posterous has caught FriendFeed in terms of traffic. While comparing Posterous to Friendfeed is like comparing a bagel to a piece of fish, his graphs from Google Trends also show Friendfeed down big since the acquisition.

So what happens to Friendfeed now? My guess is that the service will continue to lose users and will eventually fade away with the popular features ported over to Facebook. Which is very, very unfortunate since I believe that the Friendfeed technology has the potential to create huge disruption in the forums provider arena.

Find more stories about: blogs, FriendFeed, microblog, rubel

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.

Find more stories about: Blogging, microblog, nextNY, NYC, startups, tumblr

Earlier this month NY-based microblog service Tumblr launched photoset functionality. Today they have announced a new “submission” option. Tumblr founder David Karp notes, “The author starts posting about a topic they care about, the readers start contributing, and before you know it, the author has become a curator. Tumblr has always been uniquely suited for this type of blog.”

Content can be submitted by email or Web and the form for submissions is customized by each Tumblr blog owner.

This type of content submission has become popular. Many blogs are taking “contributed posts” more and more. Another example, comment service Disqus allows bloggers to take comments left on their site and turn them into full posts. We will see more of this type of submitted content in the future.

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NY-based microblogging service Tumblr has announced a new feature today: Photosets. Photosets takes a bunch of photos and creates a Flash-based slider/photoshow of the photos.

You can either upload photos or link out to other photo locations (flickr, photobucket, smugmug, some porn site, etc.). Additionally you may link your photo of your dog willy to his twitter page.

Unfortunately it does not appear that there is any option to embed a photoset outside of the originating Tumblr site. This could be a great way to get Tumblr content further along the Internet highway as long as the photoshow links back to the Tumblr site.

If you are new to Tumblr, check out CEO David Karp explaining how Tumblr works.

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For practically the last work week, the "replies" tab in Twitter has been out of service. People in the know began to push users over to the Summize service to see the replies. What I don’t understand is why Twitter doesn’t change the link on the replies tab to point to Summize – wouldn’t that (at least in the interim) alleviate some of the negative press?

Many people have hopped on the bus to FriendFeed’ville (initially driven by the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray). If you are a regular CN reader, you already know my thoughts on FriendFeed. Corvida explains why you can’t leave Twitter. Others wonder why everyone is bitching.

So come up close because I am going to tell you a little secret… it’s about the traffic Twitter was driving. How many people really give a crap that you just went surfing, that your dog peed on the floor or that you just went to Ikea. Sure there are a few, everyone has some fans. But the majority of Twitter users are bloggers. And from that perspective everyone is trying to milk Twitter for the traffic. Let’s get real here folks.

I have about 3,000 followers on Twitter and when I posted a link early on, I would see anywhere from 10-200 visits to CN from the link. Of course if others "retweeted", that is to copy a twitter message into another content stream, the traffic was even higher. Lately though, the traffic has dropped significantly. From my studies using a variety of proprietary algorithms, I have seen a decline of 60-70% of inbound Twitter traffic.

So I have 3,000 followers, what about those people with more? A couple of power users include: Jason Calacanis with 30,000 followers, Techcrunch with 20,000, Mashable with 8,000, ReadWriteWeb with 2,000 and Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang with 9,000. What kind of traffic are they seeing when they post a link? Techcrunch uses twitterfeed so every crunchpost goes directly to the 20,000. Jason promotes Mahalo several times a day – how many of the 30,000 are visiting from the links? No matter how many, it’s good traffic I believe.

Since I don’t know the traffic from other large follower users, the only thing I can go by is when Jason demands that his fans go comment on a photo (typically of his dogs). Within minutes there are usually 30+ comments. This means the actual links are much higher than that.

I’ve asked before for Twitter analytics but I guess first we need to get the service stable. :)

Now here’s another secret for you at no cost because it’s happy hour. Let’s take this traffic concept a step further. I might subscribe to a blog that uses Twitter but what’s the likelyhood that I will actually visit the site? Rarely for advanced users. But with Twitter, you always visit because when you click the link, and henceforth have just driven at least one monetizable pageview to that blog (this one included). Now for CN it doesn’t matter much – but if you have 10k+ Twitter subs and are using Twitterfeed, that could start to amount to something over time. Side note, I don’t use Twitterfeed for CN – I try to only post what I think are the top CN posts into my Twitter feed.

No matter whether the blogs that push links on Twitter are generating revenue or not doesn’t matter – they are still getting eyes to their content which is great.

The issue is what happens now that a core part of the Twitter audience might be packing their bags for other locations? I believe this is part of the concern of everyone who is writing about the service. It’s like wondering what would happen to a few blogs if Digg died tomorrow.

I don’t believe Twitter is going to die, be killed or go for a suicide. Twitter is easy to understand and use. It’s perfect for the mainstream. FriendFeed isn’t. FriendFeed will do very well also for the set of users currently using it. I am not sold that there’s mainstream appeal coming for FriendFeed.

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