David Karp from Tumblr, speaking at EBE09

Karp explains that (with a team of only 10 people) Tumblr started to work around the idea that text posting platforms were designed for low editorial content. Materials uploaded to Flickr, YouTube or Delicious allowed for very easy content sharing. The idea at Tumblr was making post editing very easy, and integrating the other sharing options: taking the idea of those basic functions and make basic buttoms, build them to make posting easy, so that… anything important to the user could be posted.

Tumblr reinforce profiles, but skip comments in order to avoid pollution: “we prefer a positive predominant tone. We incentivate this with features such as “send a short message”. “like”, “answer”, “photo reply” and “reblog.”

Karp explains that 17% of the users are taking their stuff to Tumblr to be hosted. They use their real domain in Twitter. He also talks of Tumblr and televisión: integrating the real time aspects of televisión  is interesting to them. Engaging audiences and streaming in real time.