tumblr Archive

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.

BusinessWeek is currently holding its annual “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” contest.  You can view all of the finalists here and place your votes now through November 2, 2009.

Here are the NYC-based companies on the list (in alpha order):

• Drop.io (our coverage)
• GiveReal
• Hercules Networks
• Tumblr (our coverage)
• VIVO Natural Products

Most of the companies are headquartered on the East Coast! Go checkout all of the listed companies and then vote for a NYC-based company.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Kafka at MediaMemo is reporting that NY-based Tumblr has received a Series B round of funding in the amount of $4.5 million. The round was led by previous investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Kafka says this puts the company’s valuation at $15 million and that the investors are looking for at least a $50 million exit.

When Tumblr raised their first round of venture capital ($750k) last year, the company shared a figure of 75,000 users and that they reached traffic levels in 2 months that it took Digg 8 months to reach. Kafka also spoke with CEO David Karp who noted that they will be working towards launching a freemium model early next year. The freemium model means that you get some features for free and others you pay a small fee for.

This past June, CEO David Karp provided a business update about Tumblr which I caught on video (embedded below). At that point, David noted that Tumblr has 310,000 users (no word on active), 120,000 posts per day and they host 15,000 custom domains.

If you are new to Tumblr or want to learn about the company and their model, check out this video from June with Karp.

Amtrak is excited to announce the launch of a new train service – the 2107 Microblogging Express. Please view the video below to experience a trip on the new 2107 Microblogging Express. We make a variety of station stops and connect to all local service.

This service even includes new services Posterous and Identi.ca.

People referenced in the video: Sarah Perez, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Steven Hodson, Corvida and Steve Rubel. Our special tickettaker is Tamar Weinberg.