tumblr Archive

This post written by Dan Lewis – he wants you to learn something new every day.

The news is behind the times.

Look at the bottom graph of the top picture. Relative to Twitter, there’s been virtually no news pickup of Tumblr.  It’s a flat blue line.  On the other hand, search volume shows that Tumblr’s been a “thing,” relative to Twitter, for almost two years. The news is two years behind.

The second picture is Tumblr v. Instagram.  Outside of the sale, Tumblr’s been crushing Instagram on search volume — steeper slope and everything.  And yet, until the sale, both “news” graphs were relatively flat. Instagram spiked — but only after the sale.

The third one show something different: Tumblr v. Pinterest.  Similar slopes, with Pinterest perhaps a bit steeper but with less staying power, it seems. The news noticed it… which underscores how invisible Tumblr is to them. But why’d they notice Pinterest? I have a few theories, none of which are flattering to the news industry.

Fascinating. And amazing.

Continue reading “Tumblr is Invisible to the News, As These Charts Show. Why?” »

Monitoring service Pingdom has put together a list of the top incidents for 2010 across the Web. Most of the incidents are outages at some of the biggest web services – many of which were reported here on CN first.

Pingdom notes, “The truth is that the Internet is not quite as stable and solid as most of us would like to believe. It’s a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break from time to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.”

Some of the services Pingdom looks at include: Wikipedia, Twitter, WordPress, Gmail and, of course, Tumblr.

For a fun history lesson, check out their top incidents report from 2007.

It appears that the microblog service Tumblr is currently down as of 6pm Eastern Time. From what we can tell, the service has been down for about an hour now. The Tumblr homepage is up and running although signing up for a new account pushes you to the error page displayed below.

A search on Twitter for Tumblr shows some very upset users (some comments NSFW) about the outage. Loading different Tumblr blogs and/or loading the same Tumblr blog provides either an the “Error” message displayed below or an overloaded servers message.  Patrick on Twitter notes, “Is it just me or is Tumblr down like a solid 15% of the time?”

Interestingly, Tumblr appears to host their status blog on the Tumblr platform – so it too is down. No mention of the outage on the Tumblr Twitter account as of the time of this post.

Updated 7pm Eastern – Tumblr has replied noting, “We’re working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We’re incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.”

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

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

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?” »

It appears that the microblog service Tumblr is currently semi-down as of earlier this morning. Earlier this month several blogs reported Tumblr’s big growth over the past year pushing the microblog service into the Top 50 sites worldwide. I am able to get some pages on Tumblr to load very slowly but most provide time out errors.

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. Until then, go outside and enjoy the heat wave across the U.S.

The official Tumblr Twitter account notes regarding the outage/performance issues, “A faulty network switch is causing severe performance issues. We’re working with our datacenter to get it replaced as quickly as possible.” This was the first and only message regarding the current performance issues – posted at approximately 9am Eastern time.

Update: 3pm Eastern: from my testing, Tumblr sites are still not loading. No new posts on the Tumblr Twitter account.

Update 4:15pm Eastern: I now receive the following error message when loading any Tumblr site, “Sorry! An error has occurred. This incident has been reported, and we will work quickly to correct any issues. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact support if the problem persists.”

Update 5:00pm Eastern: Tumblr is back – you may continue posting photos, browsing porn and reblogging other people’s photos and porn.

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

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

We first covered Postling last September after an event in NYC. Postling offers a social media management tool which allows businesses to push content to a variety of social networks. You can post content from the Postling dashboard to multiple blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Drupal, WordPress, Facebook, etc.

You can setup multiple users inside of one account to allow a variety of users to manage the various social media accounts and blogs. Postling also aggregates comments from across the accounts that you are managing on Postling. What’s really interesting is that you can reply to all of the comments directly inside Postling and they get posted back to the source and only to that source. So if you reply to a Facebook comment, the reply is only seen on Facebook.

Last week at the Hackers & Founders event in NYC, founder David Lifson provided an overview of the social media service. I’ve embedded the video below.

The company also announced a change to their pricing model. In our first review, the service was at a monthly cost of $9/user. The new pricing seems to be a lot more involved — basically you take the number of users plus the number of “brands” and then find the associated price per month. Now a single user managing up to 3 brands is completely free but from there the accounts jump to $250 a month. I guess what this means is if I signup as a user and create a “brand” for CenterNetworks, I can add as many social media services and my account is still free. But if an agency wants to setup 5 users and 5 “brands”, then they would be required to move to the $250/month plan.

Overall the Postling app is very strong and as more businesses enter the social media arena, the service could do very well. Postling is one of the companies that I think would better off located in the Valley where the systems they work with are located.
Continue reading “Postling Provides Overview and Business Model Change” »

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.